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Of course not! Batman TAS was an unoriginal adaptation of a franchise that was old BEFORE ITS TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC’S PARENTS WERE BORN. You can’t be visionary when you’re hobbled to the pa-
It gave us Harley Quinn, who gave us the immortal line “Doncha wanna ride your Harley?”, which is the greatest thing to ever somehow make it past network censors.
Renee Montoya was also created for TAS, though the comics writers liked her so much they added her in an issue which came out before her first appearance in the show.
*pssst* hey, if you’re looking for an original batman series to wrap your head around, try this *opens coat* “The Batman” cartoon network series in the early 2000s. It kept characters relevant while evolving plotline with introductions to beloved villains. The only series for the discerning masked vigilante
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I’m really not. Batman is usually horrible, regardless of the quality of the entertainment he’s in. Quite possibly one of my least favorite fictional entities. But the thought did occur to me that it’s possible that one of nerd-dom’s sacred cows might not actually be /good/. That certainly does happen.
For what it’s worth, I recently rewatched the entire series, and it did hold up. I didn’t have a single moment of “I liked THIS as a child? What the hell drugs was I on?”. Some episodes were better, some were a bit worse, the afterschool special episode stuck out like a sore thumb, but none of them were plain bad.
Every character is given some depth, though being a cartoon there’s no genuinely cartoonish villain I can recall, even the Joker and Croc have their moments of humanity.
Not every episode is a masterpiece, and I’m sure there are things to be found that can be criticised, but overall, Batman TAS is good.
Seems to me that calling a character others like “horrible” would be the type of thing Dorothy would warn against. But I guess we have a pretty good comments section that didn’t blow that out of proportion.
Uh, okay. Meanwhile I’m going to sit here, an American terrified of vigilante justice because people see Batman and Rorschach and think COOL!, and one of those is actually a thing the narrative is usually saying.
I really couldn’t care less what Dorothy would have to say (not the least of which because she is enamored with a vigilante right now). And I REALLY don’t care about what you have to say because nerd fights are the worst thing ever. The automatic assumption that nerds should like batman irritates me, because it is almost always uncritical.
And here ^ is where the reason why you hate it becomes clear: it’s not the execution, nor the depth, nor anything to do with the series as a experience – your problem with it stems from a apparent loathing of the concept of vigilante justice. Fair enough, though I would be remiss to not point out that Batman:TAS was nothing if not accepting of other’s differences and was quite adamant in preaching understanding of even your perceived foes. I also think it’s the first cartoon I remember that had bisexual characters. I (am pretty sure I) understand your concern, but it is misplaced.
Yes. I said as much. I indicated *BATMAN* is horrible, “Regardless of the quality of his entertainment”. I take no position on whether a given Batman thing I don’t remember is GOOD. *Batman*, the idea, and what he consistently stands for, is horrible.
I have no opinion on Batman:TAS. I don’t dislike it, and I don’t like it. I academically asked whether it was actually TEH SUPAR ORIGINAL (which it clearly wasn’t; that’s fine and all, but my point was less ‘it’s bad for this’ and more ‘and that’s fine, because originality isn’t important’), and whether it might be good. I offer no values on that goodness, because I don’t know. But whether or not Batman:TAS is good, Batman is basically horrible. It’s nigh-on unicorn rare for Batman to be presented as a broken individual who is causing harm. Because he’s the hero of the franchise.
And whether Batman:TAS ‘accepts other people’s differences’, has nothing to do with the simple core of “Broken man afflicting his brokenness on everything around him”. Batman is the person with the least excuse to become the superhero he did – his origin story is “Something traumatic happened to me, so I will ultimately inflict similar trauma on other children elsewhere in order to prevent the exact same trauma from happening again.”
He could have entered politics and done more good than his standard street sweeping, until we get to “Gotham is sick and broken because of an ancient magic curse”, which postdates TAS by at least 15 years or more. His ARCHVILLAIN is someone who, in TAS, is someone who would have done FAR less harm if Bats had never gotten involved. The Joker was just a smart crook until batman knocked him into an acid vat (But technically didn’t kill him!) Now he’s The God Damned Joker, who I’m pretty sure isn’t quite an omnicidal maniac in TAS, but is still fucking evil in ways well beyond “I kill money and kill when it’s more convenient to do so”. And The Joker is not the only Rogue he made worse than has to be, assuming the Standard Mr. Freeze Origin Plot.
But yeah no, tell yourself that Batman is Fine and I, Rutee, Should Be Okay With Him because you called him Politically Correct. My problem with Batman is that he’s a vigilante who primarily concerns himself with, on a time-basis, low-level villains. I have the same problem with Spiderman. They’re doing the least useful plausible vigilante thing, that they don’t even have an excuse to invest heavily in, and in Batman’s case, Batman has the power to do far more good within the law.
You don’t understand my concern. And don’t you dare try to claim Harley (and maybe Ivy?) being bi as the show being fine in every respect. Given that it took them 20 fucking years to actually say that was canon (Which, whether I like it or not, is EXTREMELY important to not getting harrassed by nerds), they score no fucking points for it. Especially not when I’m reasonably confident it wasn’t intended – this isn’t relevant to its value to gay or bi people, but it’s DAMNED sure relevant to whether we give people kudos for it.
I’m not going to say you should be okay with him. However, I am one person who loved Batman TAS while strongly disliking most other Batman media because 1. other media doesn’t usually hammer home that Bruce has a problem and being Batman is not healthy, and 2. TAS’s batman is not this forever gritty grimdark douchebag punching all the criminals, he also funds rehabilitation programs (as Bruce) and actively tries to help criminals getting back onto the right path if they want to.
This Tumblr post better describes why I love TAS while not caring much for the Bat’s other interpretations: http://kryallaorchid.tumblr.com/post/85762466740/fabula-unica-underwater-carpentry
At a glance, you kinda contradict yourself. At first you say that Batman is the hero and as such cannot be shown to be a broken individual who inflicts harm by his actions. A few paragraphs later you go out and and say that Batman makes some situations worse and causes some of the villains to do more harm than if he hadn’t intervened.
And yeah, you may well be right about the joker in B:TAS (though not about Mr. Freeze, and I’m not sure B:TAS follows the “acid vat” origin story, the Joker has had so many backstories that it’s essentially impossible to say which is the true canonical one, but I digress…), but the series doesn’t gloss over it imo, and in one episode even makes it a major plot point that ultimately remains unanswered, leaving it up to the viewer to make up their own mind. Yes, Batman is the protagonist, and usually ends up being a net benefit if you consider harm done versus harm prevented, but he has his critics even among the good guys. Bullock is the main one there, and while it’s tempting to dismiss him as a fat, cliched, donut-devouring sourpuss, he’s also shown to be courageous, unbribeable, and a very efficient investigator.
When you say that Batman’s motivation amounts to “Something traumatic happened to me, so I will ultimately inflict similar trauma on other children elsewhere in order to prevent the exact same trauma from happening again” you’re just being silly. I don’t recall Batman killing anyone’s parents in front of them, so… yeah. You’re exaggerating there to the point where you make no sense any more. Dial back a bit and maybe we can have a fruitful discussion about that.
As for the lesbian relationship between Harly and Ivy not havin been intended… My pet theory is that it was pushed past the execs and regulatory bodies by making it so overt and ham-fisted that it went right through people’s legs (as opposed to over their heads). It may not have been a planned effort by the studio or DC Comics, but someone on the creative team definitely wanted to put it out there.
The appeal of vigilante superhero comics is that a desire for things to be that simple. At least in my opinion. I’m not fond of Batman (mostly because the whole, better than everyone at everything thing is just tiresome), but Spider-Man for instance is a character I really do enjoy.
Life isn’t that simple, but it would be nice if it was.
And what do you think about the X-Men. A team that is hated and hunted for what they are, who do practice vigilante justice, but specifically because the government is unable or unwilling to deal with the problems surrounding a minority.
Yes, in reality, that would be somewhat horrifying. But in fiction. It’s a nice bit of power fantasy. It’s a complex problem simplified into a bit of wish fulfilment.
(Also, technically, the 60s TV show Batman was not a vigilante at all, he worked with the police and government, so maybe all incarnations don’t fit under your original hatred (this is meant mostly as a joke))
Whether someone is ‘a’ hero and ‘the’ hero narratively are totally dissimilar things, so no, I didn’t contradict myself. He is generally a bastard. The narrative generally treats what he does as right. These are two things that don’t have to relate to each other, but in his case, generally do. Batman can, and does, suggest morally reprehensible bullshit and the universe will say “yeah that’s about right, good call Bats.”
If TAS is an exception, great. It might hold up for /me/ if I rewatched it (which I’m not going to. I spend most of my free time playing video games, not watching TV. Nothing agin’ it, it’s just not what I do.) But Batman, as a whole, generally has this as an enormous problem.
And no, Batman doesn’t kill people’s kids in front of them. That’s why I said he avoids doing the EXACT SAME THING. What he does, is he throws them off in prison, for what is by the numbers, more likely a crime of necessity than anything else. He’s denying kids their parents – he’s just not doing it by murder. Hence, ‘similar’. What happened to him is worse, sure. I don’t see why that justifies his bullshit street sweeping, especially given that he seems to know it doesn’t do anything in most iterations (hence the damn speeches on how the city is dying etc etc). I’m not ‘exaggerating’. I’m just uncomfortably aware of what it is prison actually IS in the USA, and where crime generally comes from. Arkham Asylum actually doesn’t stand in much better, given that it seems to be where Joker’s gangmates come from, even if prior to going crazy trying to understand the joker, Harley was genuinely trying to help people.
As far as the X-Men, they’re more interesting for how they play into respectability politics than they are for using their superpowers. Given that the ones who seem to get slots on the team are usually capable of rather absurd bullshit, them fighting back against civilians strikes me as the definition of excessive force, but I’m pretty sure Sentinels are actually a thing that cartoon didn’t make up, so there’s at least that. As far as I’m aware, the X-Men usually just fight supervillains, which when they’re not The Black Panthers but Mutant-flavored, is fine. Batman and Spider Man don’t have problems where they’re fighting supervillains either, /by and large/ (The Acid-vat story, regardless of it’s SUPER TRUE CANONICITy, bc I give a fuck about canon, and Mr. Freeze, are the exceptions here). Supervillains represent a threat you actually need something superhuman /for/. It’s what makes them /super/villains (and yeah this probably makes some bat rogues questionable, since I don’t remember all their schticks. I guess Nigma might have stolen the crown jewels or something important in an episode at least?) There’s nothing disproportionate about that, and since supervillain motivations are often not remotely grounded in anything realistic (Chairface Chippendale wanted to get his name on the moon!), there’s little else to be said. Where they start to mirror real world groups, you can have problems (Everything I’ve seen of the X-Men indicates a very tumultuous relationship with groups like the Black Panthers, sometimes recognizing that respectability politics is bullshit, sometimes buying into establishment groups), but even where supervillains /have/ human motives, they’re still generally doing something wrong that ‘has’ to be solved with violence.
So, bringing /that/ back to Batman, in theory, if he spent his time politicking and basically didn’t bother with small thugs (Whom fall under the province of the police, and which he’s not really doing much about with crime fighting measures anyway), I’d actually be fine with him. Then he dons the suit because let’s say, Ivy’s robbing the zoo. And that can /work/ as a cartoon.
Batman is a superhero I’m pretty against, but Batman in a Giant Robot (Roger Smith, of Big O) works fine, because he’s not, you know, broken and inflicting his broken on Paradigm. Heck, while his giant robot often punches out other giant robots, a lot of the problem solving is ultimately about other matters entirely, and the only person who ends up in prison is the well-to-do thief with a giant robot who’s doing it just because he can. And while itd oesn’t have to work out THAT nicely for the non-super villains, it… definitely ought to be closer than the whole ‘grab them all, throw them in prison, THAT will prevent a child from going through the trauma I did (while neatly ignoring the similar trauma I’m causing because I didn’t kill anyone to do it)’
Actually, with the more well written Batman stories, he isn’t dealing with the petty theft people and the joe shmoe criminals. On more than one occasion he tries to give people a second chance, sometimes as Batman and sometimes as Bruce Wayne. The “normal” people Batman targets are usually Mafia types, only going for the lesser dregs of the group usually to get intel on what is going on.
He doesn’t deal with crime of necessity types unless their necessity is something a bit more dangerous or again mob related. The best written Batman iterations are not the vigilante thug Batman, but the one who listens and tries to help as both identities.
I will admit there are often depictions of Batman in terms of only his more action oriented BASH ALL CRIMINALS EFFORTLESSLY BRAA… Usually the movies and videogames… and part of the 90’s dark and gritty stages… But the Batman I know (and I do not claim to be the outright expert so I know things will be picked apart) knows when to try to talk as well as when to kick butt. He knows the system is broken and corrupt, but he is trying to fix it as best as he can while keeping the broken parts form getting more and more out of control. It ends up being cylindrical (with both the prisons and Arkham creating and bolstering the ranks of the villains), but he does try to fix those issues on the outside (Bruce Wayne) and the inside (Batman).
I liked The Batman a lot…but I tend to keep that quiet, because this was Not A Popular Opinion back when the show was on the air, and thus people were discussing it more than occasionally.
Seriously though, The Batman was actually way better than I thought it would be when I first saw commercials. The Clayface origin/evolution was actually really emotionally impactful.
I watched a few episodes of ‘The Batman’. The first three, to be precise. I’m fine with changing the characters, but those three were just so… Predictable. Also, it felt kinda dumb to have The Penguin acting as an intimidating physical opponent to friggin’ Batman. (The Joker was a little iffy, but at least it kinda-sorta fit.)
I got into The Batman a few years ago. One thing I really liked is how they had Batgirl start as the sidekick BEFORE Robin. She was an excellent character, put to very good use on the Maxie Zeus episode.
Yeah, the series didn’t have the psychological depth of B:TAS, but it was pretty fun at times.
It’s partly (some would say solely) responsible for how we see the character Batman portrayed today. It was dark Batman in a time where the most recognizable version of him was the Adam West tv show and Superfriends.
*Checks*
It does. So no, this isn’t really an indicator towards ‘originality’ (I should clarify, ‘originality’ is kind of pointless and not actually a concern of mine, but I did wonder if it was true.
Ah, and yes, it probably is partially responsible for Dark Batman in public perception, in that it helped keep it alive in the public in the middle of… very silly Batman movies (I’m pretty sure he was better remembered for… wozzit, Batman and Robin? Where Ivy kills people by making out with them? Either way, recent movies, not Adam West), so they were less shocked with the Nolan movies. Definitely not solely, but almost definitely partially.
the first Keaton Batman movie was an earnest attempt to make Batman serious, following the trend in the comics at the time (just as 60s Batman, for all that we mock it now, was a mirror of the comics of ITS time, and for that we can pretty much thank Wertham and the Comics Code for forbidding anything more serious *spit*). It’s a bit silly in spots nevertheless, but unintentionally so. The really silly stuff didn’t start to creep in until, oh, the third movie.
Really, the 1989 Batman influences are pretty clear, including the reuse of Danny Elfman’s fantastic new theme for the character, the design of the Batmobile, etc etc.
Yeah, I was pretty sure we were in full on SERIOUS GRIM Batman mode at this point, comic-wise. And yeah, even as a kid I could tell it wasn’t supposed to be silly it just… was. Well, BnR, anyway, I don’t really remember anything about the others, though I’d be impressed if the Riddler one was serious, which you seem to be indicating it wasn’t, and the Penguin one was not something I was allowed to see, but looked serious.
Batman (1989): Michael Keaton and Joker (Jack Nicholson). Batman Returns (1992): Keaton, Penguin (Danny DeVito) and Catwoman (Michelle Pfieffer). Batman Forever (1995): Val Kilmer, Riddler (Jim Carrey) and Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones). Batman and Robin (1997): George Clooney, Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman).
that last one killed the franchise until Nolan revived it in 2005, 8 years later.
@StClair actually, if I remember correctly, the original plan for the 60’s Batman was a serious take with the actor from the then recent Tarzan as Bats, but then Hugh Hefner(I may have misspelled his name, but I don’t care enough to look it up) showed the really old campy Batman movie at a party. This caused a bunch of people to set up showings at colleges and stuff (like some sort of proto-hipsters). Seeing the popularity of this campy Batman, the series was retooled before the Tarzan actor even had two pictures taken in the Batsuit. So actually, despite Adam West’s Batman bringing the character and comics more attention, the comics regressed back out of a newly refound seriousness to mirror the show.
I learned that ‘fun’ fact from a comics history class, so I figured I’d share.
i think the thing i liked about it is that it really…played with the short story format in interesting ways? like i guess what i’m comparing it to internally is Twilight Zone, although TZ was probably much better. but it ended up doing a lot of character studies that were just. really good for cartoons, i think. there are a lot of people who end up liking the villains much better than batman because they were allowed to…screw up, essentially. and there’s something very cathartic about that. i feel like it really codified Batman as He Should Be – ethical traumatized isolated dude with too much money, hahaha.
but, yeah, a lot of the love probably holds to nostalgia. which, i don’t think is necessarily a bad reason to love something, but you gotta know what you’re doing, as with most things. sometimes you love something for how terrible it is.
and then sometimes you love something because, screw the system, nobody can stop you. exhibit a: my stephanie brown avatar
…honestly i would Not Be Surprised if a lot of the love for batman tas comes from how terrible most comic books are
The best thing about Batman:The Animated Series (at least in my opinion) is the art direction and story telling. It was much more dark than many animated shows of its time, even up until now, and was very “film noir” in its direction. I am a fan of Batman, but it was the animated series that made me curious. Of course if you don’t care for Bruce Wayne period you’re SOL haha. It’s worth it for the art at least.
that scene with Two-Face and the lightning strike sent chills down my spine, hahahaa. and Joker’s Favor is absolutely a classic. also i really love Mask of the Phantasm and can never get over Bruce believing he doesn’t deserve to be happy like NO, DON’T, BRUCE, NO, IT’S OKAY, YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MISERABLE, GDI GET A THERAPIST. and batman beyond is such a good continuation
there are a lot of things to love about it! the art deco stylization is so distinctive and i’m never going to get over the title sequence in MotP being just the credits sung backwards or like. just the title sequence from btas. that’s such beautiful storytelling, so short and succinct and perfect. but yes
There was a bit in the comic that ran alongside the (animated) Justice League where the Phantom Stranger shows Flash (who got in an argument with Batman earlier) what Bruce’s first Christmas after Crime Alley was like. He opens all his expensive presents from Alfred without enthusiasm, until he gets to the Grey Ghost playset. And for a moment, he’s a little boy again, jumping around the living room with the toy plane…
And then little Bruce catches sight of that big portrait of his parents over the mantel. And says, “I’m sorry.” For forgetting his vow. For being happy. Just for a moment.
He thanks Alfred (not noticing the tear the latter sheds) and asks him to please take care of the presents, while he goes downstairs to train some more. And a much chastened Flash quietly tells the Stranger he’s seen enough.
Hm, I guess that’s possible, but I would think it’d be a hard thing to notice for a kid (at least, in the same way; like, I think most of my objections wouldn’t occur to a kid, but it still might be deeply unentertaining for them). TAS did air for a long time in syndication, right? Folks coulda easily gone back to it later, if it did, after trying out batman comics.
Definitely possible. I mean, no idea if it’s true, but possible.
i did kind of come to it as a college student, hahaha. i was probably a newborn when BTAS started airing, and I never had cable or Cartoon Network growing up.
i think kids – especially young kids – would probably process it more on an aesthetic level. like a lot of toddlers don’t necessarily understand everything that’s going on in a Disney movie, but they can see the pretty princess and the prince and the villain and understand what’s going on. Or understand that there are good robots and bad robots and how cool they are as they fight each other in SPACE or on EARTH. so you’d see the Dark Avenger and how smart he is as he figures out who the bad guy is and then also feel weirdly sad for the bad guy but end up putting him in jail. and then you’d be cool because of the batmobile and the great music.
you’d just have to be the kind of person into superheroes or supervillains, probably. and be interested by the noir elements. or maybe you saw the batman movies and were like “this is cool” and then you got to have a steady stream of merchandisable batman.
but mostly what i meant about the cartoon being better than the comics is that comics!Batman in the 90s was just. such an asshole. like you know how BBC Sherlock is – he was worse. he did much more manipulative shady shit, and literally everyone was at his beck and call. he was the Maryest of Mary Sue male power fantasies and i’m…not sure how much that’s changed but, like, at least they include other people in those power fantasies now. (for how long?? who KNOWS. god. i cry. comics are a disaster. comics were a mistake.)
but where comics tend to be up and down in quality, btas was a steady stream of reliable good content. the animated verse, anyways. (talk to me about the comics no don’t don’t talk to me i can’t. i cannot.)
(okay on a level i love how absolutely absurd comics are but that’s also. so frustrating.)
Oh yeah, Beyond is fantastic, but it also has a lot of weak episodes and suffers greatly from the not entirely interesting Rogues Gallery, the way that B:TAS was defined by its fantastic, memorable cast of villains who carried the show more than Batman himself.
I think my favourite episode was the one where all the kids of Gotham get sent to a reform school that basically abuses them into compliance, and I think the show would have been stronger had it ran with more of those.
For basically being Spider-Bat Akira, Terry ended up being so goddamned fantastic that he eclipses a lot of DC’s output since. Not bad for a character born from an executive mandated “Batman in High School” show.
Batman TAS premiered my freshman year of college, most of the guys in my wing of the dorm would gather in the residence hall meeting room to watch it on the big tv before we headed to the cafeteria for supper.
Greatest thing ever when it was new!
I might also agree with you. Like, Superman was, at least, pretty consistent. At its worst it was boring. But, like, BTAS had some reeeeally stinker episodes. And sometimes its quality was all over the place. You never know if the next episode is going to be amazing or, y’know, The Cape And Cowl Conspiracy.
It just depends on if one is personally more enamored with having singularly great episodes like Heart of Ice, despite the terrible valleys of I Am The Night, or if instead they’d rather have something that’s more regular and more polished.
Oh yeah, when B:TAS had its highlights, “Almost Got ‘Im”, “Heart of Ice”, “Perchance to Dream”, “Joker’s Favor”, “The Man Who Killed Batman”, some of this is in the All Time Greats for western animation. Also then you get the mutated farm animals episode or where Catwoman gets turned into a furry.
I tend to prefer arc based shows, so Superman spending the entire series building up to the Fourth World, with Michael Ironside as DARKSEID, while also having long arcs devoted to Lex Luthor and Brainiac in their most perfect incarnations across any medium, on top of having a lot of really good standalones, like the Mr. Mxyzptlk episodes and the Late Mr. Kent where Superman has to solve his own murder, dang it was just great. It had the unfortunate fate of being sandwiched between B:TAS and Justice League, the two peaks of the DCAU, but more people need to give S:TAS a shot.
‘Cause any show that can turn Toyman into a horrifying badass deserves some cred.
S:TAS was right up there with B:TAS for me, though I saw it much later, as I’m pretty sure it was produced quite a few years after B:TAS.
As for ‘better’… well, as you both pointed out, it had more focus on arcs and it was more consistent, yet on the other hand B:TAS had some gems one can never forget. Thankfully we don’t have to choose and can actually watch BOTH during one lifetime, as they both rank high on the must-see western animation list.
Ultra Car was just a cheap knock-off of Go-Bots, which was itself an even cheaper knock-off of Transformers, which was a cheesy ripoff of the greatest show ever: ULTRAMAN!
Technically those references don’t go together, though. Picard and Dathon were fighting alongside each other (as probably were Gilgamesh and Enkidu unless that was their first meeting – been a while since I read any EoG), whereas Carla and Walky are on opposite sides.
(Technically you could argue that they’re both fighting ‘with’ each other in some creative wordplay à la the Hamilton opening number, but I feel like that conflicts with how the reference-as-communication was handled in Darmok…)
… Which, to be fair, makes one wonder when one thinks about a certain quote from Men At Arms, about why it’s much better to be at the mercy of an evil man than a good man…
Not that Granny’d ever call herself ‘good’, I suppose. (Or, she’d probably just point out that ‘good’ and ‘nice’ are not the same thing in the slightest. One of my favorite characters, she is…)
I will always consider it both bad and good that she and Sam Vimes never encountered one another.
Bad because that would be a meeting so epic that it would render all other fiction obsolete.
Good because there’s a strong possibility that the mixing of their personalities might tear the universe asunder. We’re talking “Unstoppable Force meets Immovable Object” here.
I have to know, in this scenario how much of the disc is left afterwards? I’m not gonna bother song who wins because I can’t imagine anyone running in this scenario, but the carnage must be huge.
I’m thinking it would involve criminal justice and jurisprudence. Someone committed horrible crimes in both Lancre and AM. Granny knows the apprehended suspect is guilty and intends to mete out witch-flavored justice here and now. Vimes insists on doing it by the book. even if that means the perp might weasel his way out…
Yeah, people seem to forget Carla’s orientation a lot when shipping her. I’m really hoping its just due to the assumption of heteronormativity (as in, the assumption that everyone is straight unless stated otherwise) rather than that thing where people don’t tend to believe trans people can be queer because they assume that all trans people are straight.
I dunno, I get suspicious and paranoid sometimes about stuff like that.
I’m just happy no one’s doing the “homoromantic asexual trans woman, that’s not a real orientation” thing yet. Though I suspect we’ll get at least one or two if Carla ever spells the whole thing out directly in the comic.
I’m actually a bit curious to see Carla’s stance on sex, because Ultra Car was pretty sex averse, but also took a lot of pride in being able to get off her partner, so I wonder if she’ll be a similar thing where she’s into giving but not so much receiving pleasure.
Unfortunately it’s practically inevitable. The further one gets from the range of mean±1σ the longer the string of descriptors inevitably gets if one wishes to be precise, which often is very important when one wishes to find a sexual and/or romantic partner, but also the more knowledge one needs, and often doesn’t have if they’re part of that normative 68%, to parse all of it.
Using myself as an example, I could self-describe as “a heterosexual cis male” and I’d be telling so little as to feel like I was lying while at the same time a fair bit of the population would see that as containing significant redundancies. If I go for the full short form it becomes, “a panromantic heterosexual white cis male Dom sadist with strong ‘daddy type’ aspects and some specific minor masochistic tendencies who is open to polyamory but dedicatedly monosexual.” Much of that is going to confuse, and thereby possibly disturb, people who don’t know how to unpack all of it and who therefore will either make assumptions based in stereotypes or will write near all of it off as actually “not a real thing.”
Oh, oh, ME NEXT!
Short form: cis male (because calling myself heterosexual really doesn’t feel right anymore and I shall not tell a lie).
Long form: pansexual heteroromantic exhibitionistic mostly-cisgendered male ‘Master-slave type’ Dominant with slight sadist tendencies when disobeyed yet also at times a ‘slave-Mistress type’ Submissive with major masochistic tendencies, open to polygamy as long as he is the ‘central link’.
Or they could just be shipping with no regard to canon!
I mean, you get ships between two straight characters of the same gender all the time. I suspect there is a discrepancy that favors higher % heterosexual ships for homosexual characters that’s not really noted because of the lack of homosexual characters in general, but still, shipping is not really about who could get it on in canon. You could even say it favors non-canon pairings.
If you ship two straight people together you still get literally all of fiction for your straight fix. The reverse doesn’t exist for queer representation.
It’s the difference between Human Torch being played by Michael Jordan and Black Panther being depicted by a white man.
yeah, if it’s not possible in canon due to any reason, for example sexual orientation or even physical location (different universes), it’s just a ‘crack ship’ and is still allowed. =)
Prediction: Walky will prepare a thirty-page essay to prove the point and nail it to Carla’s door a la Martin Luther. In the process of researching he will learn the Power of Studying. And then promptly forget it because all-nighters are like that.
Part of me is seeing Carla follow Dorothy and Walky to Gender studies class one day and continuing this argument, only to have Leslie win out all of them.
We’ll move on through the rest of the storylines for the day and every time we pass this part of the hall, Walky and Carla will be deep in this argument.
Actually, looking at the preview panels, this puts a different cast on the shots of an upset Carla. Maybe Mary doesn’t do anything else horrible today and it’s just an argument over cartoons.
Do you mean this particular instance of it in this particular dorm with these particular speakers, or do you mean the gestalt of all the near-identical conversations on the subject that have been had over the past several years?
Usually wood, but I’ve been thorough in testing it. Chemically treated leather doesn’t seem to count, but rawhide does, as does buckskin tanned with mashed brains. Trials on lacquered wood have been inconclusive.
This is how most internet fandom arguments go. But oh Carla, I feel the same way about Symbionic Titan. That show was well written and had so much potential. Allegedly, the merchandise wasn’t selling so it got cancelled, but I’m not even sure exactly how cancellations and things like that go.
I’m not an expert on the workings of network television but for cartoons it’s usually a mix of merchandise and ratings. Entire cartoons are made just to sell toys. *cough* TRANSFORMERS, POKEMON, MLP, *cough* Original ideas have a much harder time and have to be interesting fast to build a fanbase. That’s why ST died and Ben 10 survived long past it’s expiration date. Also I think CN just didn’t get Tartokofsky for awhile.
Tartakovsky! Creator of Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, And Sym-Bionic Titan. Of course I butcher his last name. Apparently he pitched a few shows to CN that weren’t picked up.
Wow, it has a lot more to do with money than I thought. Although I suppose it makes sense. It’s a shame though – not that I wasn’t into Pokemon when I was a kid.
Pokémon has the benefit of being a tie-in to one of the most successful videogame series ever, it has drawn thousands of kids into playing the games, and it’s old enough that it’s merchandise appeals to both young and old.
Why girls in particular though? I feel like most of the time, young children are socialized into gender roles – especially in regards to toys geared towards young children. Girls would like the show, it’s just that Mom and Dad and the kids in class think Mecha shows like that aren’t “right” for girls to watch.
It’s sort of the same concept of “fake” Gamer Girls where women can’t possibly play and enjoy video games, where in reality they make up a good percentage of sales. I feel like if you market something specifically for boys, which I feel they would have done regardless, you’re basically shooting yourself in the foot. Like how quite a few politicians are just now realizing women have the right to vote (and make up half any given population) and are scrambling to seem appealing.
Well, mom and dad /are/ the ones doing the toy buying, in the executives’ view, so any fastidiousness on their part is part of the point. Granted, some of their target audience has allowances and can make /some/ independent decisions on this matter, and parents are often not as fastidious as the executives assume.
It ultimately comes down to ‘it’s common wisdom’ most of the time, along with confirmation bias; at least, outside of toys. In theory, it’s possible they’re actually exactly right about toys, but it seems unlikely to me that the exact same justifications that vidya and movie execs offer in contravention to the truth, are actually correct when toy makers deploy them
That makes sense. I feel like from a business perspective you’d try to make as much money as possible, though. In the case of Symbionic Titan, there’s even a female lead (a princess!) who is arguably the main character, so that might be a way to get the more conventional thinking parents to buy toys of the sort for their girls.
You’d try to make the most money possible, yes, but when video game or movie execs offer these justifications, they’re trying to do the same thing. They think that they are making the call that will be most profitable, based on the evidence they know. “Mom won’t buy these toys fro her daughter.”
This is the same Mom that ‘won’t go to see an action movie about a woman’, or the same Mom that ‘won’t play video games with any real action involved’ (It is no longer tenable to claim women won’t play video games, given the smaller market). And those things have been demonstrated to be untrue, even as tendencies. I can see how, in principle, kids legitimately might change the calculus, but I’m not going to assume it will.
The kids aren’t the ones buying the toys themselves, but they’re the ones telling Mom and Dad that they want such and such, “please can I have it? I want it, please???” -that’s usually how it goes, even for the parents who say no for gendered reasons.
I just don’t buy the arguments that the execs in movies and entertainment give – it’s not them being reasonable to me, because “girls” merchandise simply aren’t less valuable.
Think of how much money Disney makes off their princess franchise merchandise, things like Tinkerbell, Minnie Mouse, it wasn’t a mecha show but Frozen made a TON of money – and that movie had a female lead that was obviously strong and powerful and didn’t end up with anyone at all, most of the men were pretty much background characters. I don’t what gender you are, but it might not matter because I bet you’ve seen at least one Disney movie in your life. A princess movie, specifically. When people watch on Netflix, buy VHS or DVD, buy dolls and play sets Disney makes money off that.
Other examples – My little pony, which famously was also consumed by some grown men. Barbie. The Powerpuff Girls. Even stuff that’s not “girly” by comparison: The Hunger Games – main character is a woman. Harry Potter- written by a woman, one of the main characters is female and you bet that franchise is consumed by a lot of women and girls. JRR Tolkien’s works and Peter Jackson’s adaptations. Yu Yu Hakusho. Dragon Ball Z. Samurai Champloo. Inuyasha. Eureka Seven – an actual mecha show, a romantic one at that, that many boys and girls loved. Full Metal Alchemist – is pretty much a prosthetic mecha, mystical show with a male lead, written by a woman and also consumed by a lot of girls and women.
So to me, for Symbionic Titan, with the story and characters, could have been spun any number of ways and people would have bought. If you build it, even if you build it for girls, people will come. A lot of companies in a lot of different realms are missing out because they simply won’t or don’t think to move with the times. As I said before, parents do influence the purchases, but in my mind not nearly as many of those as there are parents who will buy anything for their kids. And the show got cancelled anyway. Why couldn’t they have just taken a small chance, given that NOT selling anything would have gotten the show cancelled.
Cuz they are sexist fuckin assholes.
YOung Justice could have sustained toy profits,
from all the boys alone!
There is literally no justification. They created a well written wildly popular breakout show, and all massive female audience was just profit gravy.
Young Justice is just the kind of show to create a generation of female comic readers. BUT noooo.
dickheads.
That’s what I’m saying. You will not go wrong marketing a gender neutral show. You won’t. There are too many women with money, and there are too many parents with money consuming this stuff. So I don’t understand why execs are still “scared” that their shows don’t get consumed by women and girls. There literally aren’t enough female centric shows and movies in the world, we’re basically forced to consume the other stuff anyway.
The problem is that there’s a prevailing theory amongst marketers that marketing a gender-neutral show means you’re “competing against yourself.” Market segmentation is frankly one of the most unforgivable things in media; the idea of just making something good and accepting the audience you get is unheard-of, because you’re SUPPOSED to be aiming for one demographic at a time. =/
Gender-specific toys are a curious thing. When I was in my teens, I though this bullshit would be done with in ten years time. Now that’s a long time ago and gender specific toy marketing came back with a vengeance.
Teachers have even told me that boys won’t play with a pink super ball because “pink is for girls”. wtf?
It part, it seems to tie in with merchandizing (like Lego which went from a building kit targeted at boys and girls to running lines of merchandizing products for e.g. Star wars that target boys only (or girls only, but I think the sales are down on that stuff, there is only so much you can do with a Bibi and Tina kitchen set).
So, like in other ways, the idea of how girls should be gets in the way of fun.
I think LEGO still is gender neutral. I wouldn’t look at licensed merchandise like LEGO Star Wars or LEGO Batman to judge their business model, because the target of these sets is directly influenced by the target of the products they’re based on.
There IS a strange lack of female LEGO minifigures, though, and I’m not talking about “characters”: go pick a LEGO playset that’s, I don’t know, Police Station or Racing Cars or whatever other generic set: the anonymous, all identical minifigures are mostly male. If there is a female one, she is the exception and alone.
Yeah, that’s part of the point. And when Lego decided “hey, let’s market specifically to girls”, they didn’t start creating normal lines with more female minifigs; instead they created a completely different line with more humanized minifigs, a lot of pink and purple, and a simpler, more rounded aesthetic. It has spinoff lines for Disney Princesses and Elves, and it’s nice to get some different settings in there, but they’re still really clearly meant to be “The Girly Lego”: compare this with this. There’s nothing wrong with pretty elf castle sets per se; I just resent their being set up as The Lego That Girls Will Buy, complete with their Special Figures You Can’t Use With Normal Lego, so we’re not even getting any more female Lego minifigs out of the deal.
(Although on the bright side, when The Force Awakens came out and everyone was going “WHERE ARE THE REY TOYS?” Lego was like “Hey, we have an affordable mini-set just for Rey; how ’bout that?” Good moment in toy marketing, that.)
Pink superballs are the best t whip at your cousin’s head. “OW WHO HIT ME WITH THIS?!” “Couldn’t have been me, mine are orange *silently fiddles with like seven more pink ones stolen from sister in pocket*”
The “girls don’t buy our toys” argument has problems with it, number one is “you don’t provide them toys,” number two is “just what age group do you think you’re selling to? (i.e., the older ones — including college age — do have money),” and number three is “parents do ask their children what they want, you know.”
Huh. I have a non-streaming account with Netflix. Adding a new season of YJ (along with the other items I’ve been loking at) could make me upgrade my account.
I miss Young Justice too. And yeah, a huge amount of college age (dare I say, millenial) as well as some older folks (comics and anime existed before the 90s ) consume this stuff. And a lot of those people happen to be women too.
Another reason Sym-Bionic Titan and Young Justice got cancelled could be continuity. In shows that have dramatic storytelling and continuity airing them in order is important. You can’t air the second half of a two part finale then jump to a random episode from the next season the next day. It might confuse the audience or *cringe* make them change the channel. Shows like Teen Titans Go, Spongebob, Fairly Odd Parents, Powerpuff Girls have an advantage in that they can show any episode in any order because each episode is it’s own individual thing. Adventure Time was supposed to be like this at one point until it evolved into a show that has strong continuity, yet still each episode is it’s own thing and airing them in order doesn’t matter as much. Same with Regular show, and to a lesser extent MLP:FIM. So there’s another little reason for why good shows can get cancelled. Of course rating and merch sales still matter way more.
Well starting up a toy line has a bunch of upfront costs. They don’t want to leave those toys sitting on the shelves after they’ve already spent the money to produce them.
That’s what I don’t understand. How could you NOT make a toy out that, even if you didn’t want to market it towards girls. It’s like, do you know how popular transformers toys are? How popular the Gundam series was back in the day? That could be you!!
*Which makes sense given that trans women are really allowed no wiggle room on violence and even defending yourself from attack as a trans woman can land you in jail. Not to mention the way that so many are scouring over trans women’s behavior looking for secret signs of “male reality” in the form of things like violent behavior, anger, or sexual aggressiveness (nobody and I mean nobody hates men more and thinks less of them than transphobes and sexists). Not to mention all the tropes about trans women being scary dangerous crazy people who will kill you and there’s a lot of reasons for Carla to be extra-invested in making her pacifism VERY prominent.
Which is an even bigger shame after we just had the “You don’t have to be perfect to merit concern or respect” thing, all told. It’s a really hard message to avoid, perfection.
Though that one is especially hard to ignore as a trans woman, because that myth of the mystical trans killer is evoked A LOT to justify not only dehumanizing trans women in general and denying their personhood but also their murders.
When people evoke “oh, I was so scared and enraged by that duplicitous evil trans woman, I lost my head” to justify violence against us and demonize our own self-defense. It becomes really hard to shake it off and not add a quick disclaimer to whatever dark joke we were just making.
“the mystical trans killer”… what in the actual… . By Odin, where do people get this shit? Suppose I’m quite far removed geographically from where you are, but I didn’t expect to see THIS as a sociocultural difference!
*shakes head*
It’s strange to me that people in general don’t seem to believe women can be violent, unless race and gender are taken into account. I once watched a documentary type show where the white female drug runner played up that she was innocent,basically because she was a pretty young middle class woman struggling to make it as an actress who didn’t know that her Asian best friend was running a small drug trade operation.
All that quick fast money, constant traveling, with luggage she was not allowed to mess with, buying expensive stuff, and she didn’t realize (more like, she didn’t give a shit enough to ask questions, really think about it or gtfo till they got caught – then she started talking). Even people who’ve smoked pot before realize you have to buy it first.
She testified against her “friend”, which was the thing to do but she completely threw her under the bus, and she basically got off with a slap on the wrist by comparison. I think one year or something like that. While her “best friend”, got all the time, like 10 years, and she was made out on the show to have lead her astray.
It’s amazing how much you can get away with when you’re not “other”.
Ah yes, the typical “It wasn’t something I enjoyed so obviously no one could possibly be encountering joy from this”, a subset of “I have not experienced this discrimination firsthand so therefore you have not experienced it”
I find this horribly common in the software world. If anyone asks why I’m getting out, it’s because there are too many “smart” guys who think exactly like this.
More like an “it being cancelled isn’t proof it’s bad, you never watched it and it was cancelled due to executive meddling.” It’s a reference to a LOT of shows that get dissed for being screwed by the network. =p
Iiiiii dunno. She seems to have a particular read in mind that actually is something networks do generally frown on, rather than focusing on somewhat less cared about measures of ‘smart’. She shouldn’t have insulted Walky, but in fairness, she *may* only deploying this after Wally has impugned something she really does stake a lot on. Whether that’s why or not, she does still make elitism a little worse, though.
I’m certain that Carla is beating back on Walky only because he insulted her beloved thing first. There has been some Dexter merchandise in this dorm that Carla has probably seen, but she has not criticized anyone for it. (I’m thinking of the purple wristbands that Mary and some others wear.)
Seriously, though, there are so many that stumble so badly and react so negatively to realizing that just because media treats them as the default human does not actually mean they are the only people who exist and the only audience whose tastes matter and so things might not actually be for them and that’s okay and not taking anything away from them.*
* See dudebro whines about anything geek related with female protagonists or that isn’t about grimdark brooding characters or involves gameplay that isn’t about shooting things with guns, white people reacting to Beyonce, straight people angrily wondering why queer issues are in the news this month or trying to wrap their heads around Steven Universe, and so on…
Also see that weird subset of DoA fans that come out during the queer arcs to complain about how things “suck”, are “unrealistic”, and are super alien to their experiences and how this must be bad and thus they can’t wait for (insert straight drama arc here).
Or the ones dismissing Carla’s interest in a show, when they never accused Walky of that when he was getting everyone to watch Dexter and Monkey Master.
I mean, unless they’re some kind of chromovores, but Ultra-Car was cancelled before that script was used, and when D&MM recycled the concept in Season Six it was pretty unrecognizable.
so both these cartoons were created by in-universe david willis right? has he ever considered rebooting them with the characters in a college environment? I’m sure thatd be something we could all enjoy
Also…. HUZZAH! I figured out how to get a gravatar that isn’t that harpy-witch Mary (election campaign ads to the contrary) and I did it WITHOUT registering!
…. because, you know. Stubborn.
…. and lazy.
…. mostly lazy.
…. Really, the old algorithm that assigned me Walky was dead-on.
Very true. Sexuality, gender, familial relation to one another, pfft, ships gotta sail*.
*Though I sometimes get a little bristly when shippers het-ship canon queer characters because it’s like, really? There weren’t enough straight characters for you to work with that you have to dequeer one of the few characters we get?
I dunno, I imagine it’s just unfortunate connotation elements from my own history with reparative therapy.
Yeah, I totes get that. I felt that a lot about the way people were wanting to throw Danny at Ethan while he was still with Amber, just because I’m so used to the “bi dudes don’t count if they’re with women!” narrative from in and out of queer spaces.
Something I’ve had to come to understand is that it mostly really is just “wouldn’t they be cute together!” rather than any kind of statement on how the character “should” be or some kind of erasure of their identity. I still think it’s perfectly valid to feel that uneasiness, though, ’cause we wouldn’t be thinking it if it wasn’t coming from terrible experience, so I do think it’s perfectly valid to be weirded out at the idea that what this homorantic ace trans lady really needs is to bang a dude.
De-queering people is absolutely different from ignoring straightness, yes. Like, it’s okay to just be uneasy and all too! I’m not sayign ti has to bother you. But it is different, and if it does, that’s also very okay.
Well, often straight characters get turned gay/bi by shippers, so I’ve come to understand shippers see two characters that have a dynamic they like, think they’d work well as a couple, and they start shipping, disregarding what canon says about them.
I honestly mostly shrug at the shipping community: if I ever shipped a couple, it was the canon one. My favorite character is, 90% of the time, the main character. I consume media in a very passive way, so I probably ain’t the best authority on the behaviors of fandom.
Yeah, but shipping canon straight characters who have subtext as queer has a long standing tradition owing to how queer fans for the longest time only ever got subtext.
I dunno, it feels a bit different for reasons, similar to when a canon POC character is whitewashed in adaptations to make them white being different than when a character who was canon white is played by a POC.
Cerberus: You have a point, and I understand the reasoning (for example, I am fine with Roland being played by a black actor in the coming Dark Tower movie, but I’d be turned off by, Iunno, Black Panther being played by a white dude. It would be weird).
I guess I simply care too little about shipping to have any reaction to it that isn’t the occasional “that is some fucked up ship”.
Cerebus: I’m a little more conflicted on this. I get the traditional lack of queer representation. On the other hand, I’m not at all sure that shipping culture has ever relied on actual subtext or that much of it is actually driven by queer fans. Often the subtext seems to be “were on screen together” and even that isn’t strictly necessary.
As I understand it, shippers are more likely female and even if the ratio skews queer, still mostly straight. In DoA, Amber’s our canon example – slash writer even. Is she writing Steve/Tony because she doesn’t feel represented or because of hidden queer subtext? Or is it because she thinks male on male is hot?
Is that really different from a straight guy wanting two female characters to be lesbian for each other because he thinks it’s hot? Which should be fine because it’s turning straight characters gay, not queer ones straight, right?
I’ll admit it does seem different to me. But I think we’re dealing with pretty subtle differences here.
Honestly, I don’t like shipping that ignores anything major about the characters – sexual orientation or hooking up characters who really despise each other in canon or whatever.
Cerberus (and everyone on here, of course), I so appreciate your point of view on issues like this… I don’t have very many friends that talk about these issues (everyone’s on a “no negativity” kick where they get annoyed about “over” posting on issues right now ugh) and so it’s hard to check my own thoughts and privilege sometimes. I love this comment section. /sappiness
She stated in that universe that she was homoromantic. Word of Willis has confirmed she’s still homoromantic in this universe. And she’s obliquely referenced her homoromantic side in the quote Regalli highlights.
The only way it could be more canon would be if she spelt it out with those experimental lasers she borrowed for her prank against Mary.
A couple of days ago I was reminded of the “Diversity Closet” comic in another context. I don’t know how I could have forgotten Carla’s statement therein. I stand both re-reminded and memory-challenged.
Thirded! I love analyzing that kind of stuff to death! (I am so lucky to have partners that put up with my tendency to analyze literally every piece of media to death)
Both. Dorothy’s fully capable of finding the overlap.
“Tax cuts for shows with at least two non-normative characters not portrayed in a negative manner will yield long-term increased efficeincies in government (by reducing hate-based crime), the economy (by reducing workforce discrimination), and in internet usage (by eliminating something like 20% of the flame wars out there and at least making the rest stop using the word “gay” in a derogatory manner).”
I sorta empathize with Walky here. I’m never sure what to do when I agree with the themes or message of a show or movie, but it’s just… not very good. I always feel bad, and find myself wishing that ethics, good politics, and writing skills always came together.
If by that you mean an only occasionally funny, immature, insult to a beloved and groundbreaking cartoon that only survives because it’s lack of continuity makes it easier to air and is created by people who have admitted to never actually watched the original, then no.
I assumed this went to an interview. This is absolutely not the developers hating themselves. This is them planting the criticisms of their show, in the mouth of an odious dweeb who’s an out-and-out villain. If you’re reading this as ‘the developer hates themselves’, you’re missing the really obvious subtext XD
I actually respect the show less for this episode, in much the same way as that guy who killed Ebert or Siskel during Godzilla is less worthy of respect.
I’m not sure they do. There’s been like half a dozen episodes doing similar things as that one (like saying the show should be more serious, or try to change to appease critics), and that wasn’t the first of them; they had one with the Young Justice team calling them out as not serious
It usually comes off more as the show runners dismissing the critiques if anything.
It’s pretty funny. Whether they watched ‘the original’ (adaptation of a comic book series) or not isn’t relevant unless the only valid existence of something is the original (…adaptation of a comic book series). They made a pretty hilarious cartoon out of the characters. It’s only an ‘insult’ if you can’t stand anything less than glowing praise sung from on high.
Also, it’s pretty funny that your criticisms very nearly mirror those of the comic book fans during the broadcast’s original run. “THE NEW THING IS BAD, THE OLD THING IS SO MUCH BETTER IN EVERY WAY”, iteration #idek. I had the misfortune of having one in my shared spaces during the original run. STill, I ignored him, and that too worked out well for me
The best Transformers cartoon is Beast Wars, and those guys didn’t watch the original series either. “They didn’t watch the original series” is so far off my list of reasons why things are good.
Given that the original work had a plotline where they had a 50-60ish old man fuck an underaged teenager as a means of showing how the underaged teenager was “evil” and “manipulating”, I’m grateful to both shows in pushing away from the original work and slavish fidelity to its spirit. And I say this as a genuine fan of the original work (seriously, what the hell original Terra arc, what the everloving hell).
Initial reaction: “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!?”
Secondary Reaction: “What the hell am I thinking it’s comics. And not that far off normal Merika.”
Tertiary REaction: “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!? God dammit.”
Yeah, the original Terra arc was all sorts of fucked up in the comics and it being the 1980s isn’t really enough of an excuse. I absolutely love Marv Wolfman and George Perez and that whole run, but that whole bit was just an ugly mess of what the fuckery.
Even if I did just have to get up from the computer and pace around the room for a bit, flailing my arms in enraged frustration at said differing opinion.
What in the name of the Vishanti did you find mediocre about the Young Justice cartoon?
Just…everything. I mean, it wasn’t bad, by any stretch, but everything about it simply failed to engage me on more than a significant level…although I liked lot of the choices – Using Miss Martian (one of a handful of characters who haven’t returned in some form since the relaunch that I miss), the creation of an original Aqualad (and his connection to Cal Durham), etc – it didn’t entirely gel. An enjoyable way to spend a half hour at a time, but not a patch on the DCAU, or Teen Titans.
Back when I was a kid, even the lousy stuff got multiple seasons. For a kidvid show to get cancelled, it had to be blatantly atrocious. Or a politico died at an opportune time and the whole Saturday block got pre-empted to cover his funeral. I’m looking at you, Hubert H Humphrey!
Oh, man– my Saturday morning cartoons got preempted for a similar reason when I was little. Nobody actually died, but Nancy Reagan got treated for her breast cancer. I missed a new episode of the Flintstone Kids so they could talk about old lady breasts at me.
Oh, well– at least they didn’t preempt Mighty Mouse.
There were a few when I was growing up that were trashed by the studios because they didn’t fit an easy formula that they felt they could market or had a prominent girl character that defied traditional boy-focused marketing or so on. But then, I might have grown up a little after you.
She likes that part though. It’s less stress and allows her to try to believe that this relationship is just for fun and isn’t under pressure to be something its not.
She also likes that he believes in her, and isn’t crushingly codependent. She thinks he’s funny and clever, and fun to kiss, and he chills with her when she has a rough day. He’s her refuge from her self-enforced mission to constantly achieve success.
8) He’s really really hot.
9) He respects and doesn’t whine about there being a set end-point for their relationship.
10) He’s into the same dumb cartoon thing she is and is fun to hang out with when she needs to shut off her brain.
11) He’s chill, which is a nice change of pace from her usual hectic schedule, and isn’t intimidated by her having big aspirations or being smart (which is sadly rare enough to be notable among straight men).
12) He believes in her dreams and thinks they are awesome.
13) Did I mention, he’s described as surprisingly hot?
ooh a 14) dorothy likes taking care of people, and walky is just self-sufficient enough to deal with most of his problems while also needing extra support occasionally. enough to make her feel needed without making her feel like she’s doing all the emotional labor.
Dorothy doesn’t strike me as the type to take her pop culture that seriously. Considering how much effort she puts into her academics she’d burn out pretty quick if she took her cartoons as seriously and they’re meant to be an escape for her. Or she has the same problem I do where it’s impossible for me ti turn my brain off ever and not take all the media I consume seriously.
Yeah, Dorothy takes her career aspirations seriously and that’s about it. She seems like the type of fan who acknowledges all the stupid in her favorite shows and loves them despite that because it lets her shut off her brain for a bit.
Man, I have had this same argument, except about “Young Justice” or “ATLA and LoK” so many times. Mainly when other people start hating on them (although with the second two, four times out of five the people hating on ATLA only say Shyamalan’s movie, and the other time it’s because they don’t like the fact Nick had show with a same-sex couple). God but the riches I would have if I had but a nickel for every time I had this argument.
I was never a big fan of Korrasami but it has the benefit of being better than just about every other pairing on the show. Then again, Walky more or less is Bolin isn’t he?
Ironically enough, yes, several of these people were. Anyone who argued against ATLA and LoK would invariably make up the majority of people I met who argued against YJ.
Heh. That’s actually funny.
The ones that assume hentai DVDs are nice cartoons for the kids alarm me, though. Where did they even get those, a garage sale?
Right off store racks, sometimes. I recall reading one dude talk about how he warned a parent, like, thrice, that Ninja Scroll wasn’t for kids, and they rented it over his protestations because it’s a cartoon, then came back angry because it wasn’t good for his daughters.
That actually happened to me, my dad knew I liked anime so on a blockbuster run he got me a “ranma 1/2” tape, which is fine, and “kite”, which is a fairly graphic movie about an underage female assassin who iirc occasionally used sex to get close to her targets (mind you it’s been like twenty years since I watched it so my memory might be shaky on the details)…
I still have some. People my age (born in the early 90s) were around when VHS was still used. It’s hilarious because so many older people assume we always had the internet. We did, but definitely not as it is now. When i was young, the internet was still AOL.com, we wrote essays in school by hand pretty much until college, and we mainly used the computer for things like Oregon trail.
I…still use mine. To record and play back cable TV programs. I will neither confirm nor deny the rumor that I knew Tom Bombadil when he was a young man.
They are perfectly well aware that the VCR clock is meaningless, and have a perfectly functional pendulum-operated clock hanging from the wall to the right of the TV.
(Also, my dad’s an old-school tech-geek who knows what all the buttons on all the boxes and remotes do and keeps the manuals just in case and knows exactly how to read them. They’ve also got dvd and blue ray. They just don’t get rid of their old stuff.)
There’s plenty of reasons other than Korrasami — which isn’t actually a reason, in my book, but anyway — to be down on LoK. I liked it, but it was really hurt for only being picked up for one season at first, which forced a rushed resolution to the first season which in turn left them short of ideas for the second one — which was a muddled mess.
Also, the writers had the damnedest pattern of not letting Korra win fights on her own, which made me sad.
While Book 3 and 4 of LOK were definitely an improvement Books 1 and 2 did sour a lot of people- mainly due to crummy dialogue, unlikeable romantic relationships and rushed/forced resolutions. Book 1 had great potential but ultimately fell flat in the end and Book 2 had the worst villain of the franchise. Also Book 2 for some folks shit on Aang and Katara in some respects (like I can get Aang struggling as a dad quite well, but Katara not getting him in line is ridiculous to me and always will be). Book 2 is enough for some people to hate the show tbh because it sometimes ruins enjoyment of the previous franchise in some respects.
Books 3 and 4 were definitely better even if they weren’t perfect though. It even in some ways made the first Book a little better knowing that makorra wouldn’t get back together at all. Not enough to save it has ultimately the worst book of both shows but still.
ATLA is definitely better in terms of writing than LOK, but LOK isn’t overall, a bad show. It’s mainly because ATLA had a solid vision from beginning to end. The creators also had a lot of help in terms of the cultures and characters from the beginning in ATLA. LOK did not.
Your last paragraph is what I was trying to put into words! I was watching LOK and I was like, “where are they going with this?” story and character wise.
The problem is that because it was supposed to be a miniseries it HAD to have a resolution by the end of the season, which is a shame cause otherwise they could have used an entire season trying to give Korra and everyone else their powers back instead of the awful second season we got, still to this day the worst to come out of that season is the atrocious animation, first season was AMAZING (how can it not be when you’re working with the same people that did the Boondocks?) but the second season was so bad I almost quit the show after the first two episodes.
Book 1 of LoK was the best one. Not just the best of LoK — the best of the entire Avatar franchise. It did not fall flat in the end. It was perfect in every possible way. Lumping it together with the horrible trainweck that was Book 2 is an insult to it.
So that everyone may be able to have subjective opinions that are objectively correct, I shall now rank the four seasons of LoK and compare them to AtLA.
From best to worst:
1. LoK Book 1: 11/10
2. AtLA (all books taken together): 10/10
3. LoK Book 4: 9/10
4. LoK Book 3: 8/10
5. [quarantine distance]
6. [quarantine distance]
7. [quarantine distance]
8. LoK Book 2: Because it introduced Varrick, and because the First Avatar segments were actually really good, it gets bumped up to 1/10. But if anyone wants to give it, like, -∞/10, I’m not going to argue.
Note: I have not seen the Shyamalan movie, nor do I intend to.
A wise decision on Shyamalan’s movie. Guy whitewashed the cast so bad he might as well have been using snowmen, the effects were iffy, the acting horrid except for Zuko, Iroh, and Zhao, and he skipped over the mechanist, the Kiyoshi Warriors, and Jet while simultaneously cutting the balls off of the Blue Spirit. And that’s just some of the reasons to not watch it. I honestly cannot express the sheer amount of vitriol I have for that movie.
Yep. I had a lot of issues with it, among other things the pacing was all messed up, the lack of character development for quite a few folks, where they went with the concept of the Avatar State. I agree with you in that it just seemed rushed and not well though out as a result. As for Korra herself, I don’t know, she seemed developed and not developed at the same time? Like how she and most of the characters seemed to be defined by their relationship to the previous series’ characters, the entire show seemed that way as well, and it wasn’t enough for me to really enjoy it.
I’m also in the camp that pretends the ATLA tie in comics aren’t cannon. But I do think I’m biased in that way, because it’d be really hard to surpass as a great a show as ATLA was. Korrasami was bold and brave and wonderful, but it didn’t make the show.
yeah imo the only season of korra really worth watching is 3. i mean, 4 was definitely better than 1 and 2, but it was lacking something with regards to kuvira and the resolution of the major conflict. otoh, of course, there’s the last few minutes. and some of season 2 is worth watching just for varrick.
I’m surprised by these claims that season 3 was better than seasons 1 and 2… I’m watching the series for the first time now, and while the first two seasons had some serious pacing issues, a quarter of the way through the third, all I’ve seen is absolutely everybody clinging to the idiot ball like it’s their darling child.
Most especially Korra and Tenzin in the second episode…granted, she’s rather averse to thinking things through, and he’s blinkered once he gets his mind set on something (ironically for an Air Bender), but I can’t even begin to comprehend how even they thought ‘hello, Mr Middle Aged Earth Kingdom Guy, now that you can Air Bend, you have to come with us, because you have to be an Air Nomad, now’ would go over well.
Yeah. It’s like something like that would have turned into a philosophical discussion in the first series (remember Jet and Zuko when he first joined the Gaang). A huge conflict in the plot was whether or not the four nations could live together in harmony again- a lot of people were suspicious of each other, and mostly for good reason. Especially Tenzin just blindly accepting the dude, it would have been more in character for him to stop and think about it first, or at least investigate or something before making such a rash decision.
LoK characters making dumb decisions is a constant in all three seasons. What sells S3 for me is the Red Lotus, particularly Zaheer; it also has some spectacular scenes towards the end and we get to see Tenzin go beast-mode.
Yeah, the first season was pretty weak. I’m not really mad at the fact that a lot of the folks who hate it, stopped there (Me and wife marathoned it after the announcement to see if it was remotely justified to treat Korrasami as something added at the last second and without actual support in the prior text).
Ultimately, I did like LoK, but I think it really suffered from not having a single overarching plot for the entire series the way AtLA did. I mean AtLA had a lot of side plots and new threads and some plotlines that were introduced and resolved within one season, but everything was built around the solid core of “defeat the Fire Lord, end the century-long war.”
Korra didn’t have a plotline that lasted the entire series, the goalposts were always shifting with each season. It made the storytelling way clunkier that AtLA’s was. And as delighted as I was to be getting some canon F/F, almost every single romance was horribly written. I only liked P’li/Zaheer and Jinora/Kai as they appeared onscreen – even with Korrasami, I liked the concept way better than the execution.
I don’t dislike LoK, but I feel that in terms of storytelling it’s definitely below that of ATLA. Several dues ex machina reversals, Asami pretty much having no flaws, and characters aren’t quite as compelling.
What poor chump would they get to judge which of them deserves that apple. (And why apples such a negative fruit in anncient religion/myths of the eastern Mediterranean?)
It’s not that apples themselves are evil, it’s just that the Latin words for “evil” and “Apple” are remarkably similar and very easy to mistranslate as a result. (If I remember correctly evil is “malus” and apple is “melus”) As a result, apple=evil, even though it would more likely have been a fig in the original oral tradition. So blame medieval scribes.
The name Pokémon is the romanized contraction of the Japanese brand Pocket Monsters (ポケットモンスター Poketto Monsutā). The term Pokémon, in addition to referring to the Pokémon franchise itself, also collectively refers to the 722 known fictional species that have made appearances in Pokémon media as of the release of the sixth generation titles Pokémon X and Y.
—————————
NOT Pokeman (or Pokemans).
Well, Joye and Becky are getting away from a kinda intolerant/uneasy church,
Billie is lazing around after sorta kicking Becky out without telling her.
Danny is dealing with breaking up with his super hero girlfriend.
Amber is trying to hold things together, and might be looking for one of her dildos that disappeared.
Dina is helping smooth things over with the break up.
Joe is sorta texting Joyce to help her deal with issues. Although that was earlier, so… Cereal?
Roz is getting reasy to meet up with her sister.
Mary is… Avoiding thinking about her political idols.
And Ruth is… Oooookaaaay?
Amber is…almost totally suppressed by her alter.
Amazi-girl is…on the verge of exploding in some act of moral outrage hyper-escalated into violent vigilantism.
I think you’re right on that. Amazi-Girl is starting to make unilateral decisions for Amber, removing Danny from her life because of his “betrayal” and fixating on Sal as the cause of every single one of her problems. For all we know, Amber still hasn’t resurfaced after spending all day with Amazi-Girl in the driver’s seat.
Yep. We’re seeing Amber sometime in two weeks and I’m really anxious to see where that goes. Given that we haven’t seen Amber at all since then, I am really thinking that she’s been Amazi-Girl for the entire length of that day and maybe only came out of it after she did Danny’s laundry.
‘Cause I’m wondering if her recent PTSD episode from seeing Sal ended pushing her dissociation to the point where she and Amazi-Girl stop sharing memories. At least at this point, Amazi-Girl has become distinct enough that she’s not only making decisions for Amber’s benefit, but they’re outright referring to each other as separate entities now, rather than Amber assigning alters to specific actions, ie: “Amazi-Girl is dating Danny” and “Amber’s anger is the problem.”
Walky’s only argument for Ultra Car being bad seems to just be low ratings. I’m guessing he never saw an episode past the crossover. Then again I think based on his attitude towards things that require any real effort to fully understand he probably wouldn’t have liked it anyway because it wadn’t just joke after joke. From the little we’ve heard about Dexter it seems deeply silly. Carla’s probably right about her show being too smart. Walky’s attitude is once again deeply annoying. Ratings don’t automatically equal quality or lack of.
Let’s give him some credit; he’s fairly clever and decent at banter, so it probably didn’t fly over his head.
Of course, that means he never gave it a chance, which is arguably worse.
The show is about a sarcastic flying car. Which if we’re assuming the case, is actually probably just Ultracar as portrayed in the regular Walkyverse. In short, it’s probably not remotely “smart” but involved lots of pies and humor but probably had her eventually become a human robot girl. In short, something which would appeal deeply to Carla but seems just silly to Walky.
Yeah, it’s a nice character moment and makes a nice little dig about a lot of arguments surrounding niche programming. I’ve seen so many things where someone used demographics or ratings to argue that super problematic thing was somehow “objectively” better than niche thing.
It especially tends to get thrown at queer affirming works or works with female protagonists that are more popular than certain assholes think they should be.
And it’s a nice character moment for Walky because his cluelessness about how much social messages actually guide his behavioral choices (see the shoes arc) is a major aspect of his current struggles (he’s been told all his life that he’s “naturally smart” and has a hard time letting go of that because that’s a major thing he’s built his whole self-image around, not to mention his handling of certain ideas of masculinity).
To him, of course Ultra Car is bad. It had a bad crossover (and crossovers tend to be universally bad and fail to show the best qualities of either show and frequently just leave fans of both shows somewhat neutral about the other) and wasn’t popular, thus it hasn’t been socially rubber-stamped.
The idea that it could nonetheless have important niche appeal to someone not him is foreign to him, because he’s used to being more-or-less the default human and having most works be one’s he can identify with and share with other people who love the show. And that sharing part is a big reason he loves the show so much: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/02-choosing-my-religion/sshh/
Thus Carla’s experience of being alienated in resonant media is very strange and foreign to him as is having to cling to whatever media has that tiny drop of representation whether good or bad (shout out to fellow Xena fans).
^ I was too young for Xena but that’s in a nutshell why I had a huge soft spot for Mercedes Lackey books for a very long time (in a rural conservative area, that was the only representation for queer stuff I had access to that didn’t have rainbow flags printed all over it – and, like, don’t get me wrong, Pride matters but if you’re a teenager in a place with a conservative church:people ratio of greater than 1:25, and the one guy who was out in the entire school got bashed so bad he spent a total of nearly 6 months his first year out in the hospital and then he switched schools because he was afraid someone was going to kill him if he went back again? Yeah. You don’t exactly feel comfy marching or carrying around stuff with that flag painted on. Juuuust sayin’. See also why I feel punchy towards people who out others because there’s “no excuse” not to be out nowadays, and towards people who don’t accept that in some regions, it’s still downright dangerous to come out).
I feel like Hercules really suffered for having Kevin Sorbo being too homophobic of a Christian to let the gay subtext run as free and wild on that show as it did in Xena. One of many reasons why Lucy Lawless is a better person than him.
Now I’m wondering if Ultra Car identified as a gal in the cartoons.
I mean, Carla is completely correct about her gender identity (Following the basic universe rules) but pursuant to what I see modern fandom inching (slowly) towards doing, I’m wondering if the SHOW said it.
Because I think about the only way I could love Carla more at this point was if she was engaging in actual analysis of a show and trying to draw interpretations regardless of the super, super, SUPER important canon.
Well that or she could get into a song and dance number.
That’s already in the calculus, and isn’t a song and dance number. And yeah, I imagine she did! It’s pretty great.
…dammit, I’m going to have to amend that. Ultra-car is just plain /right/ on why Ultra Car got panned (This doesn’t make her correct about DntMM). Kids can sometimes be terrible, but even worse can be marketting, who ‘know’ certain toys won’t sell, because conventional wisdom says they don’t. It’s astoundingly unlikely that the marketers are more progressive in her childhood than they are in the modern era (even if Willis does often make named characters moreso than normal).
In which case, Ultra Car may have been the first cartoon ever to broach that subject and thus holds a very dear place in her heart for even presenting that as a potential thing that can happen.
Like how Steven Universe does that for a lot of non-binary kids.
I feel like I’m missing a lot of good cartoons now. Been like over 5 years since I’ve looked into anything going on. I’m aware of some good ones, like the Avatar sequel Kora, just haven’t actually had the time for it.
I think it probably did, as an ambiguous take on that would likely have been subjected to less studio meddling.
Though whatever the answer, Ultra Car being a girl robot in particular is clearly of great importance to Carla and a major point of her identification with the character.
…of /course/. Now I’m actually glad I asked, rather than having something I reread and realized would comes off as the exact thing I’m criticiizing in other nerds. An actually ambiguous thing. Because that’s all you can get away with on TV. hahaha ahahaha… sigh.
And you know she’s had all of that bullshit thrown at her. She’s probably been gatekept if this is at all popular (even as a niche thing). I mean, really, of COURSE she’s been gatekept, she’s an engineer. But it didn’t just happen in her studies, because of COURSE it didn’t.
I mean, not everyone is… but it seems too fitting for her arc. All the money in the world, and it didn’t stop a darn thing.
Largely because most of the media is happy to pretend that Caitlyn Jenner is the only trans person on the planet. And so it becomes really apparent how her wealth buys he out of a certain level of nonsense, but not a lot of the standard day-to-day transphobias and little digs.
And I think it’s a major aspect of Carla’s character. She’s rich. She has a family who loves her. She’s somewhat spoiled rotten (or rutten, if you will, yes, I will immediately go to Pun Hell, do not collect go, etc…).
But as you note, that does not save her from having the same bullshit a lot of us go through. From being beat up and ostracized as a kid, from having been gatekept out of various things, out of dealing with standard issue sexism fucking with things she loves, out of dealing with casual transphobia and having authority figures do nothing about it, from having to deal with all the other -isms that apply to her.
And that’s sort of an interesting truism about being marginalized. That to the world, it doesn’t matter who your parents are or what you’ve done with your life, you’re just X marginalized identity at the end of the day (I’m thinking specifically of incidents like the Harvard professor who got the standard anti-black police harassment, because the racist cop who hassled him only saw “a black guy” and assumed the standard litany of racist bullshit because of it).
Cambridge Police are super assholes.
My insurance company was late ( 2 weeks ) in processing my check, and I was stopped in Cambridge for a bullshit reason. ( why did you switch lanes when I was tailgating you ) . Arrested, towed, impounded. I was tossed in A dungeon for 14 hours without even a drop of water. And I’m white, and the cop was female.
That’s how a respectful whiteperson is treated in Cambridge: police state. When he backtalked the Cambridge Cop I knew it was going full arrest.
Boston Cops are a lot more decent. They are professional. I think there is something about liberal places that attracts fascist police.
After Mary’s homophobia there is something heartwarming about Walky and Carla bickering about a TV-show. Walky does not have a problem with her gender identity – only with her choice in entertainment.
And contrary to most people he acknowledge the value in something that is very important to Carla and that most people would just dismiss as a quirk – UltraCar – so much that he has strong opinions about it. Incredibly stupid opinions that he will be OWNED about, but it is still validating.
who cares about trivia like how you’re plumbed or which bathroom you use? what counts is that you like the wrong things, and are thus the wrong kind of nerd!
Yup, it’s the sort of low-stakes argument that Carla likely wants to be surrounded by rather than the attempts to undermine her hard-fight gender. It’s where she’s engaged with like a fellow geek rather than being made to defend her very identity.
No, but it would very much color the nature of the argument.
If he knows, it’s an “I don’t care that you’re not cis, we’re arguing cartoons like normal people because that’s what’s important” thing. Or maybe a “you only like that show because you’re trans, all the normal people preferred the good show” thing.
If he doesn’t know, it’s just Walky being stupid without a lot of subtext, except the subtext that gets read into it by people who don’t know that he doesn’t know.
I’d guess that he does know. He’s been surprisingly aware of subtle clues in the past.
Doesn’t matter – SHE knows that this is not about her identity but about her favorit show. For me, that’s what her line in panel 1 is about, that she makes sure to keep this a fandom thing.
I think he does, as they dorm on the same floor and Mary would not be the type of person to be ‘silent’ while confronting Carla or keeping her thoughts to herself. Walky probably knows about the BS between them and why. Drama spreads faster than the cold in dorms.
I’m going to say probably not. Generally I don’t like to assume that all the characters know the secrets the readers know. From Walky, I’d expect some reaction – probably ugly at first, if only from ignorance.
I mean, I guess it’s possible Joyce is the only one who doesn’t know about Carla, but I’d gotten the impression she passes better than that. Sal figured it out. Ruth knew. Mary figured it out, cause she’s a snoop. That’s pretty much it, as far as I know.
Aww the ” to smart ” debate, which is code for “it was to good for its time” or “it just sucked and people are just using that as an excuse to say that a franchise is misunderstood when nobody else seemed to warm up to it despite their best efforts.”
Kind of like when your teenaged daughter brings home her new douchebag boy friend he’s a dick to everyone he knows and when you point that out she replies with ” You got to give him a chance he’s just misunderstood !” Or some Bullshit like that.
Yeah I’m 100% on Carla’s side. Shows have definitely been cancelled for being more or less “-too smart” for mass appeal. Low ratings don’t really tell you anything about quality. And for all we know the ratings were fine but too many girls were watching it and as far as advertiser’s ate concerned if boys aren”t watching, no one is.
Yeah, that’s a consistent enough phenomenon that I have no issue in assuming that that was what happened with regards to the Ultra Car cartoon.
Often times being liked by the “wrong demographic” is considered to be the kiss of death for even a popular cartoon. See how much Legend of Korra got dicked around by Nickelodeon because its fanbase was mostly girls or how Static Shock needed a lot of major cartoon luminaries sticking up for it to keep running because it wasn’t “popular enough with white kids and only white kids buy toys”.
Hell, even wildly successful shows like Teen Titans, Avatar the Last Airbender, and The Batman Animated Series got dicked around a little bit simply because the studios couldn’t figure out which age range they appealed to and it didn’t fit their standard model of shows.
And it’s not just cartoons that get that type of meddling. Buffy had the Dawn arc added largely because the network at the time thought that since the characters were in college that they’d no longer be relatable to teens and so needed a new teen character to appeal to the younger demographic. Xena got messed with a bit because its early teasing of the main characters being together made the networks hyper nervous about boycotts. And Firefly’s issues with the network and all the stuff Fox did to doom that show are the stuff of legends.
I’m white and Static Shock is one of my favorite cartoons of all time. It was so good on so many levels, and wasn’t afraid to tackle serious issues like racism, gun violence, the effects of bullying, and the struggle of people to reform and escape their past.
I’m also white and loved it. I prefer it to the other DCAU shows, really. I later found out he wasn’t entirely a new character, but it sure felt like he was, and that breathed a ton of life into it.
And having school-related problems was something I related to. It’s why I also like Danny Phantom and American Dragon much later on.
Heck, Static wasn’t even really a DC character at the time. He was from an imprint called Milestone that was spearheaded by the late great Dwayne McDuffie, and IIRC it was published under DC, which is why Milestone characters like Icon and Rocket ended up appearing in Young Justice. Static’s show wasn’t originally set in the DCAU but was folded into it, and for the better, I think.
DC’s complete inability to sell Static to readers (his latest ongoing only ran for 8 issues, they still haven’t collected the original series, and they consistently refuse to just put him in the Teen Titans already) is pretty much one of the most emblematic examples of comics boxing out black characters. Dude had his own cartoon for four years, but nah, can’t run his own ongoing. Let’s give Aquaman another shot instead.
I don’t really read DC or Marvel that much, but the fact that Static is getting screwed by DC is not surprising. Infuriating to no end, because he’s such a cool character and hero with a pretty unique set of powers that are really only limited by his own creativity, but not surprising. Also, another reason I’m still upset by the cancellation of Young Justice is that at the end of Season 2 he was being set up to a member of the team for the next season. That would have been amazing!!!
Oh yeah, Static’s the bomb, and his constant shelving is super irritating. He’s Spider-Man with Magneto by way of Black Lightning powers; that’s fucking rad.
… and consider also that if the cartoon was too androgynous for the Hanks and Carols of the world to be comfy with it, ratings could tank just because parents don’t feel it’s “appropriate” for their little darlings.
See also: I was suuuuper pressured to not watch shit like X-Men and Batman and Spiderman when I was a kid, and to watch shit like Barbie and Friends or Sailor Moon or whatever. Because “appropriate”. And “people will think you’re a boy if you watch too much stuff like that – you don’t want to be thought of as a gross boy, do you?” (yeah given my mental revelations these past few months, those sorts of comments are becoming pretty funny in retrospect. And I don’t mean it sarcastically. Though it does make me wonder if she had a suspicion and was trying to stomp it out in me.)
Got to the point that I’d catch the oh-god-early showing at 4AM so I could watch them without my mother making fun of both me and the show every five minutes.
Yeah, I was a kid who’d get up at 4AM to take in my favorite cartoons – particularly X-Men:Evolution which most people thought was godawful yet I really liked a lot mainly because (in retrospect) they really laid on the queer metaphors (Beast and Spyke both hating their bodies and feeling like horrible monsters – like fuck how the hell is that not a metaphor for being trans and going through the wrong puberty?! – Storm, well, being Storm, Rogue feeling/being untouchable, could go on) and dealt a lot with the interpersonal stuff and the politics of becoming an activist. Case in point: there’s one story arc where Spyke gives up the X-Men and goes to live with the Morlocks because not everyone is a socially-acceptable mutant and it boils down to Xavier’s group isn’t helping those who can’t fit neatly into Society’s old mold – and if that wasn’t a metaphor for the divide between the “good queers” who model traditional gender roles and don’t rock society’s boat too much and the “bad queers” who either won’t or can’t perform gender in a traditional way and who refuse to take bullshit lying down and are loud and outspoken about their activism, I don’t know what the fuck was. And, like, I could go on but it was a lot of heavy shit for a kids’ cartoon and it didn’t talk down to you like a lot of shows would or overly-simplify it. And the really awesome thing was that they didn’t present him as this awful guy but rather as someone who wasn’t being helped by the X-Men the way they said they were going to help and he got fed up with waiting for them to do something and decided to go and help people himself on his own.
(seriously, might be Nostalgia Goggles but my memory of that show is that it was fucking awesome on the political metaphor storytelling and was almost certainly cancelled because it laid on those metaphors a bit too blatantly for social conservatives)
(X-Men: Evolution might be to me what Ultracar is to Carla – it is something I have a huge soft spot for despite social backlash about it being a bad show or whatever and I will fight you over whether or not it’s good. :P)
I don’t think you will be disappointed. A lot of the show is based around the struggle of identity and how one can be a part of society while being true to themselves.
It’s unfairly maligned for not being X-Men TAS. I like it pretty much because it isn’t the Wolverine Show guess starring the X-Men, to the point where Wolverine is basically just a recurring extra who only gets two focus episodes and comes off as a lovable, gruff uncle. There’s huge focus on characterization and a lot of the episodes really only have one token fight wrapped around twenty minutes of long conversations. Also it makes Cyclops and Jean Grey cool and gave them a believable romance, and typing that made me die a little.
It’s a lot more interested in the idea of “mutants as a metaphor” than any of the other shows (and ischemgeek is dead on about its handling of the Morlocks, turning them from standard fare Weird Freaks to a cast off group of social misfits who don’t have the privilege of looking hot and living in a mansion), and does the low sci-fi thing the X-Men films have been banging on about for 16 years leaps and bounds better.
Also it’s super white, which is always a negative for me but even moreso when it’s done with the X-Men, but there genuinely is a lot to love about it once it gets passed the trope-filled first season.
i weirdly like wolverine and the xmen. for an xmen show specifically about wolverine it had a lot of high-stakes drama and an intriguing conceit. and while wolverine was annoyingly Always Right, the characters around him were allowed to be nuanced in ways that they aren’t always. like Scott!! Scott was allowed to be broken and i love it. and Emma broke my heart. and Rogue was so cool. i’m not gonna lie Rogue is my number one priority in most Xmen content
Oh yeah, far as I’m concerned, Rogue is straight up Top 2 most important X-characters, right along Nightcrawler, ’cause the two of them really embody a lot of the central themes of the entire franchise, and it’s sad to see Rogue in the comics nowadays is just a big mopey Avengers jerk.
Haven’t watched WatXM yet, but I’ll take your word on Rogue being great. She was one of the highlights of XTAS, and the snarky goth Rogue from Evo was likewise good. Gambit forever remains a scumbag I still nevertheless have a deep unironic love for, though.
i really wish that there was more material with Rogue and Nightcrawler as siblings, that’s kind of my heart’s desire right there. it’s just. they’re so great and they could be even greater as a TEAM. especially considering all the family they have to deal with.
Rogue is a lot of fun. Gambit…i like him as a classic scruffy romantic hero, hahahaa. he gets his Humphrey Bogart shtick on and that’s good stuff.
…i’m sorry to hear that Rogue is being an Avengers jerk nowadays. i was happy for her that she got control over her skin. some of the decisions coming from her seemed pretty weird tho
Rogue’s back to “I cain’t tuch yuh” and the Brick of the team. On one hand I like Rogue more when she was a defined powerset (and this is something X-media tends to lack except for XTAS where it was straight up lifted from the comics), but it’s been 30 years. It’s fine for Rogue to have nice things now.
Rogue being in the Avengers is even more hilarious because now in the comics the entire Mutant race is going extinct (again) but she still just wants to keep her job.
Gambit, though, it’s weird to me how hard it is for writers to get him. He’s a charming, handsome scoundrel and a thief. I don’t get why people keep making him Scumbag McAngst.
Also he’s one of those planned to be bi but never materialized characters like Wolverine, so that’s a plus in my book.
ugggh really? what is the point of letting her touch and then taking it away. why. no. and then, like, her not supporting mutants?? rogue your evil terrorist mom is side-eying you so hard and irene is gonna haunt you from beyond the grave unless she’s alive again in which case she will probably leave you a bunch of nasty phone messages SERIOUSLY
-shruuuuuuug- because you gotta keep the tension up and how can you possibly keep the tension up unless you keep everything in a stasis of “can you or can’t you trust him” like letting characters grow and develop. what. what is that
bi!gambit. yes. a good.
…hahahaha oh man most of my rogue comics knowledge comes from those months i went on an xmen fanfiction binge for rogue/remy fic i haven’t. i havent really touched any rogue comics not even illegally
I remember getting into a hugeass argument in HS with one person who was as into comics as me because I shipped Gambit and a dude (I forget which dude because it was like 10 years ago) rather than Gambit and Rogue (who at the time I shipped with Storm, I think? Juuust cuz I think in some Storm storylines, she’s basically untouchable at home because she’s seen as a living god so I figured the two could relate a lot more to having others both in awe of and terrified by their powers – and yeah she was straight in the comics at the time but come the fuck on if a woman like her is straight, I’m a fucking pretzel. And the fact that she’s only ever been shown in comics as having het relationships is not a dealbreaker: A lot of bi folks, me included, have het relationships as the majority of their romantic history, if only because there are more people who are het than non and it’s safer to explore het attraction than non. Buuuutyeah. I’ve never seen Storm as straight, even when she was straight in canon. And even before they revealed her as bi, they were hinting at it for decades.
… I’ve also never seen her as cis, but that’s another story. She’s one I’ve headcannoned as trans preeetty much since I was familiar enough with trans stuff to spot hints at it. It would require an entire essay to explain why but the cliff’s notes version is that her character arcs in pretty much every series she’s in have always paralleled a trans self-realization and coming out process.
(on that note: how fucking amazing would it be for there to be an X-Men movie where Laverne Cox plays Storm?)
The problem with this argument is that you then are saying that if it was too smart to get mass ratings, anything that did get mass ratings must have been not smart right?
If she had argued it had been too niche, I wouldn’t say anything, but “too smart” is usually the battle cry of people who have unreasonably high opinions of themselves, and very low opinions of everyone else. THEY were smart enough to understand it. Unlike the unwashed masses.
It is such an eyeroll thing. It reminds me of the hordes of Donnie Darko fans that insist it is this deep something when it’s really just a hot mess.
Look at what she’s actually OFFERING for her argument. ‘smart’ doesn’t mean ‘engages in things geeks like’. ‘Smart’ is talking about gender in a way that resonates with her. And that is straight up not a thing pretty much any TV will do.
It’s a shitty word choice that actually does do Bad Things to discourse, but it’s not actually talking about your big problem here. And riding this hobby horse is not going to go well rn.
Yeah, and talking about gender in a way that resonates with trans people or talking about relationships in a way that resonates with general queer people is actually one of those things that does make networks super antsy and more prone to cancel or “edit” a series. Especially if it’s gotten the attention of the religious right, because “that sort of politics isn’t appropriate for kids”.
She’s using the wrong word for it, because she’s still a nerd and ranting about how the thing you like is too smart for the plebes is a somewhat messed up nerd tradition, but what she’s describing is a real situation that happens.
Love this! I have been both Carla and Walky at different times about various of my interests, especially TV shows and movies and fandoms and such, and I’ve argued about them just as passionately.
I feel like this exact conversation is RIGHT NOW, at this moment in time, going on on probably every college campus in the world. (tho prooooooobably not about Dexter & Ultra Car, since they don’t exist, but WHO KNOWS? xD)
Well fuck, now I need Ultra Car to be a real TV show cause that sounds kinda great.
Would this, by any chance, be commentary on that cartoon that got cancelled because too many girls were watching it….welp, shit, I tried googling to find the name (I thought it was Birds of Prey but wasn’t sure) and found this happens kind of depressingly often.
I’ll bet in-universe that Ultracar wasn’t watched by kids at all but had a big mass appeal to high school girls and boys when it was designed for a much younger audience.
And it was awesome. Prob the most character driven mainstream superhero show ever. its way better written than Arrowverse, or Snyderverse.
( yes, I’m sorry, But it even KILLS Timmverse-TAS. I know thats sacrilegious on this board, but YJ is just better on every level )
Girls were watching because it was good. yeah, it had a lot of female characters… ( compared to most ) , one who were well-written, complex and some anti-heroes. Ditto for the male. It had a gender and race diverse cast because it was written that way from the ground-up —- without tokens.
It drew on a massive amount of DC lore and characters.
Damn Its just breaks my brain that they killed an excellent and popular show… because girls liked it too!
Oh God, I hate it when series is cancelled for being to good. Every so often I’ll watch a new show and think, “Hey, this is pretty good.” I’ll watch a bit more and think, “Wow, this is really good.” Then I’ll watch a bit more and think, “Aw shit, it’s too good. They’ll cancel it after less than half a season.”, and they do.
Steven Universe got renewed for a full two further seasons immediately after the first season finished. We’re only about halfway through the shows confirmed run, and there may be even more after that, although I have a sneaking suspicion that Rebecca Sugar will pull an Alex Hirsch and end it when the story she wants to tell is complete.
So, now we learn something about Walky and Carla that we never knew before: They’re both nerds!
Poor Dorothy! She doesn’t even have the escape route of leaving them to it and going to visit with Joyce until they’re done. Instead she has to stand there and listen to all those words that probably only have meaning to fans of those shows!
Surprisingly, everyone else in the world is quietly having the same argument. They’re using different words so you can’t tell, but definitely still the same argument.
IIRC SP!Ultra Car did originally begin as genderless and everyone just referred to her as male, but as her AI developed she eventually realized that she identified as female. I like to think that this was something in the show, that Ultra Car realized that it was right to refer to herself as a girl, and that it was what she always was.
Probably hit Lil’ Carla right where she needed it to.
I have decided Ultracar was designed to be a show for really small kids with pies in the face but the writers made it with a lot of quirky surrealism that appealed to high schoolers and college kids who watched it instead. It was also a show for boys but the fact it was watched by mostly women also sunk it. It wasn’t actually all that smart but it was something which would appeal to Carla strongly as Ultracar becomes a girl in the final episode she saw online (actually part of a reboot to rebrand it for its proper audience).
Dexter and Monkey Master is effectively Dragonballz as it strikes me as perfectly designed for someone like Walky to think is the greatest thing ever while also being something you either got or didn’t.
The thing is I remember something EXACTLY like this happening back at the end of the “Aughties”, an anime that was intended to sell boy’s toys here in the US became wildly popular with girls for the art and storytelling and got cancelled by Cartoon Network. Unfortunately I no longer remember the title because that was a while back and there was only the one season.
Big O got a second season BECAUSE of Cartoon Network, even. Sunrise dropped it because ‘batman with giant robot’ was already sort of covered in Japan by Banjo Haran, and in any case wasn’t as popular an idea. But CN was making a bunch of money, so they bankrolled season 2.
It is all fandom. Everywhere, everywhen.
They used to have to do it in person, at gatherings and conventions, or in letters delivered by post, or in the mimeographed and stapled pages of “zines”. Now, we have the internet.
Fortunately, I tend to hang in the sort of circles where phrasing it as “my imaginary friend can beat up yours!” is not considered blasphemy and/or a mortal sin.
This is obviously a case, like most fan arguments, where both Carla and Walkie are wrong. The real reason Ultra Car got canceled was a cease and desist order from Chevron. They don’t like their Techron Car mascots getting infringed on and this would probably be about the time they had their joint advertising campaign at Disney’s Autopia attraction.
Panel 1: I love that she emphasizes her pacifism and that she’s not a murderer. And it’s a sad commentary too, because a lot of people do actually believe that trans person and especially trans woman = scary psycho murderer.
But it also underlies a lot of her general behavior. She talks a big game and wants to be seen as tough, but she also is extremely down on violence in general (being a trans girl, likely by having experienced it a lot first hand).
Plus, it also shows her similarity to Walky in that both her and him have a lot invested in their self-image of themselves as intelligent. Carla uses her “smarts” as part of her revenge scheme and advertises it as a reason to not fuck with her. And Walky has been struggling with having to adapt to actually needing to study and try in academics because of too much invested in his idea of him being smart.
Also, Carla is diving into this flamewar with both feet and by similarly insulting Walky’s golden cow cartoon series, has brought the flames to a nice roaring fire.
Panel 3: And here Walky echoes the battlecry of asshole nerdom gatekeepers everywhere in pretending that commercially popular is inherently the same thing as “good” and that his own tastes override those of others.
And no, I don’t think he’s being evil or bad here, just faceplanting on his privilege a little. I mean, for fuck’s sake, he’s doubling down on the “no one” was watching it theme, which is one of those things that is especially galling for marginalized folks, because they so often get relegated to that “no one” zone, because anyone who isn’t the default human might as well not exist.
And trans people get hit with those messages hard, especially these days, because one of the attack vectors at the moment is how trans people are such a teeny tiny “unimportant” amount of the overall public and so how dare they demand “all this social re-engineering” to accommodate such a “meaninglessly small” amount of people.
This is also used to shit on trans people who complain about transphobic characters or plotlines, because not being shitty to trans people is apparently “kowtowing to the PC demands of a tiny portion of the population” and so on.
Panel 4: Aw, the rallying cry of every marginalized geek ever. The stuff that resonates tends to be super niche and not conventionally popular and the few things that break out in a big public way tend to be mishandled by advertisers, networks, and so on that just don’t know how to handle works that don’t fit the usual mode of appealing to white boys from the much vaunted teen or pre-teen demographics.
For a lot of people in charge of making major media decisions, the notion that there are people other than white men who could be into things is baffling and frightening and they don’t know how to handle it (see all the studio confusion about how to handle the fact that women are seeing action movies that have female leads or the musical world dustup about Hamilton or the network confusion about OITNB and Sense8 being successful or the comic industry’s confusion every time a feminist woman writer’s work is wildly popular among women and so on…).
And every marginalized person has that story about that work that super resonated with them that either suddenly pushed back against the notion that they were “one of those shows” (often by killing a marginalized character and replacing them with a straighter white man) or was prematurely axed.
I also love how bitter Carla is that this thing that mattered so much to her was destroyed because people believed its toys wouldn’t sell. It’s clear that that’s a hurt she still has and that it informs a particular type of feminist and queer politics of hers that has been hinted at in places.
Plus, how important it is that Ultra Car was a sarcastic girl robot, with the girl part being emphasized.
Panel 5: “challenged what we think we know about ourselves” and “subverting tropes about gender”. Aw, yep, that’s the magical formula to getting yourself a lot of trans fans who use the work to figure out they are trans.
And I love this little exchange, because it’s such a good character moment. Of course Walky is all about the humor and the cultural references. He values the silly and humorous and that’s what he views a cartoon as being for.
But equally notable is Carla’s points which are all about personal impact and deep themes. Because those can be the fertile waters of self-discovery and a work that resonates and reflects a life experience literally no other work reflects can be extremely potent to marginalized folks of all stripes.
I’ve noted before how important Carla is as a character to me simply because she’s literally the only homoromantic ace trans woman character in any form of media I have encountered. Because that type of representation matters and makes you feel alone. Seeing Nomi from Sense8 being represented like actual trans women I know rather than the standard models of trans stereotypes was revolutionary because I never expected to see it. And it’s why a lot of non-binary trans people are all over Steven Universe.
Being reflected in media, having themes resonate in media is something white cis straight dudes tend to take for granted, but it is everything for marginalized folks and it breeds some mad loyalty.
And more than that is the trans egg work. The work that speaks to a baby trans on such a meaningful level, reflecting a reality that they didn’t even dare dream to imagine before they were even able to accept it. The work that resonates so thoroughly it ends up being the work you steal your name from.
These works are… I don’t fully know how to describe their importance to an individual trans person, but they can hold a very very special place in a young trans person’s life because it’s the work that finally broke through all the social messaging and answered the question of alienation they were always feeling or hinted at the true self they’d been running from for forever.
Like Carla, I stole my real name from a piece of fiction that resonated before I ever realized I was trans. In hindsight the trans parallels were rife and the character’s resonances are somewhat obvious. But at the time, I was simply drawn as I had been to other works that hinted at the person I would later realize I was in a way that had me casually using that name in countless game’s “what is your name” screens.
And like Carla, I’d probably go on a rant if someone started ignorantly slagging it. Because the works that you take your name from are truly special and important and a part of you.
And I’m so happy that Carla had a work like that to resonate with her in the comic world even if it was prematurely cancelled and slagged by other cartoon fans.
All the plus and highfives and internet points (and, sure, some cake too). This is why representation is so incredibly important (one of the reasons…).
Also points for noticing the similarities between Carla and Walky. I’m sure they can have lots of fun together… or annoy the crap out of each other. Either or.
The bit about advertisers reminds me of what happened with Star Wars: The Force Awakens merch. The geniuses in charge of marketing action figures didn’t think anyone would be interested in Rey. ‘Cos she might be the hero and utterly awesome, but she’s a girl so meh. They were so, so wrong- what figures of Rey did get released, vanished off the shelves within days.
(Come to think of it, they didn’t exactly push Finn figures, either- but that white X-wing pilot guy who gets less than a fifth of Finn’s screentime? All over the place.)
To be perfectly honest, I at first didn’t think Poe was supposed to be white. I good have sworn he was Latino. I mean, I guess maybe a Mediterranean white, or (because it still shows up as such on census forms) a middle-eastern white, but I really had to think hard when told Poe was white, because for the life of me I didn’t know he was.
As I’m sure has been said many times over, Cerberus, thank you again (and for all the times in the past) that you’ve levied your insight into written form.
I know that it takes a long time, but is always an enjoyable and insightful read. Often poiinting out things that I had missed while reading through the comic.
Yes yes and so much yes, representation matters so much and I get SO frustrated when the characters I ID with get maligned for the crime of not being perfect and well-together while marginalized because half the time that’s the part I ID with they’re shitting on.
To be fair to Walky, I think he would have challenged ANYONE who said that they had memorized the episode, man, woman, or otherwise, to repeat the lines.
Also, I’m not sure that saying prove it to someone saying they’ve memorized something is gatekeeping. I mean, he wasn’t saying she had to have it memorized to be a real fan, only that if she is going to claim to have memorized it, she should prove it.
That is absolutely bullshit, especially since she wasn’t saying it as part of an extended exercise in nerd machismo. She was saying it as part of why she wasn’t going to spend time doing things for fun – I have engaged in this exercise enough. That she happens to have that precise episode memorized isn’t actually material, because more likely she was speaking coloquially, and even if SHE wasn’t, most would.
Nerd machismo’s relationship to gatekeeping is probably not unidirectional, but it’s not actually an excuse to challenge people who are just sitting around or being polite, and engaging with it is not generally a good call to start with since it validates it. You can let people say they know a lot, or think they know a lot. That it’s unfairly levelled MORE against women or other people who don’t fit the mold is a thing, but it’s not like it’s okay just for that reason. It’s dumb and discourages fandom in the first place. So yeah, what Walky did was shit.
I’ve been asked the same thing because people know that I know a lot about some specific pop culture subjects.
It can annoying, but I just don’t engage with it if I don’t feel like and I ignore it. And it was from someone very much like Walky.
If you claim you know a lot about a subject, don’t be surprised if you get asked questions.
That is not saying that someone can not know as much as I do and still be a fan. They absolutely can. But there is a difference between me saying “I’m a fan of the X-Men” and “I have read every X-Men related comic from the 1960s to 2007”. Both of which are true, but if I say the latter, I’m not surprised when someone asks me questions to show off my knowledge.
Yeah, but that only tends to happen to women and other marginalized folk and that tends to happen to said folk even if they say “I like X”.
And it very much tends to be based in a type of gatekeeping as well as the nerd version of a pissing contest.
Even in the example cited, Dorothy is using hyperbole to argue for skipping an episode that isn’t doing it for her when she decided to come over for cartoon watching because the Joyce thing just happened and she needed to decompress from being main support. And Walky does the pfft, I don’t believe you, prove your hyperbole bullshit.
And it gets frustrated because especially women encounter this shit all the time, everywhere we go and it is used not only on meaningless fan stuff but to question our qualifications on literally everything. And yes, it’s a gender thing, the same thing didn’t happen to nearly the same degree when I still presented as male to the world: http://www.robot-hugs.com/technigal/
Hell, he even ends the comic referenced above still dismissing her chops after she did what he asked and then disparaging her qualifications regarding D&MM for reasons he admits in a later comic were mostly about her ruining his plans to train his future gf in how to watch D&MM right by knowing the show better than him.
Like, he’s definitely got a lot of the toxic behaviors of nerddom gatekeeping in him.
‘Cause Dorothy did make a very specific claim that Walky asked her to prove, and it is also possible that a noted sexist butthole would more easily doubt the validity of that claim because Dorothy’s a woman.
Because people /talk/. And one of the things people do when they talk is engage in minor hyperbole or otherwise inaccurate claims, when they are minor. It isn’t actually important if the fish was THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS big, or whether someone used this EXACT choice of words that makes them look slightly worse.
Just because most people do it, doesn’t actually mean it’s ipso facto good! This is combined with “This is leveraged unfairly on The Wrong Kind of Fan”, tho, and I sure as fuck don’t see a GOOD reason to start questioning every minor hyperbolic claim. And really, what’s the harm? Either you have a dunning kruger who will label anything they didn’t remember as irrelevant, or you don’t, and the march of time in a fandom will demonstrate to them that they know nothing, Jon Snow, without your going out of your way to shame them. What’s it to YOU that someone wrongly thinks they know everything about Pokemon, or Star Wars, or whatever?
That’s pretty much my reading as well. He’s doing it because he’s a nerd and that’s the nerd equivalent of a flex off. But nerds are more likely to do it to women who know their shit because women who know their nerd shit make male nerds who are insecure about their maledom feel insecure and thus more likely to demand these pose offs.
Also why his ending point is a saving face dismissal over the fact that she rose to his challenge and goalpost moving.
Like, I don’t think Walky’s being an intentional douche like so many douchey nerd types in reality, just stumbling into it, because he does have some macho insecurity issues and some negative geek gatekeeping traits.
Basically, if we were to take the weather report of his actions in comic, it’s more privilege fail with periodic showers of annoying gatekeeping and smug superiority rather than hostile with an incoming dangerous front.
My main point is still that I don’t think that Walky’s actions are based anywhere in sexism. While its annoying (and I even mentioned it was annoying, I’ve had someone try to do a “nerd flexoff” with my Star Wars knowledge and would not let it go even after I tried to ignore it), and probably socially dumb, I just don’t read the sexism in it at all.
He really does seem like the type of person who would do this to anyone. It is unfortunate that it happens more often to women, but that alone doesn’t make it sexist on his part if he would treat anyone the same. Even if it is a stupid nerd flexoff thing which is socially silly.
It can also get really toxic when combined with the “they’re faking knowledge to steal attention” gatekeeping thing. Like, questioning someone’s fidelity to a material based on their memorization of random trivia is pretty whatever and weird and all, but can get really nasty when it is used to “prove” that someone in the fan community is “faking knowledge” and thus only in it to steal the attention and eyeballs that the more privileged folks “know” is intended only for them.
I’ll take someone randomly fronting like they know a ton of trivia about something than that bullshit any day of the week.
Also marginalized folks end up being terrorized by that into not offering any opinion about a work unless they are prepared to back that up with copious notes. And now everyone knows how I built up my reflexive habit of backing up statements with archive binges when requested.
Well, I mean male machismo displays and flexoffs are still rooted in a type of societal sexism as is the impulse to do them more frequently for women in geekdom (owing to the way most geek pursuits are seen as the domain of men).
Societal sexism is not quite the same thing as someone screaming misogynist slurs 24/7, but can definitely be a social problem exacerbating and creating issues of inequality and minor annoyances.
Again, I don’t think it says anything about Walky personally other than he is a geek and this is an aspect of typically male geekdom that can be frustrating for women.
Whether it happens more often to women doesn’t mean that Walky is doing it because Dorothy is a woman though. That is entirely an interpretation, and jumping to very negative conclusions.
He really does seem like the type that would ask ANYONE the same questions.
Well, in comic so far he’s only done the aggressive gatekeeping to women. What that means is open to analysis and question, but it definitely reflects a real world reality that many women geeks experience with regards to their interests and so it naturally lends itself to that interpretation.
Like, I’m not saying he’s a bad person or needs to be pilloried. He’s just doing that frustrating insecure male geek thing that can be annoying when you’re a girl geek.
Have we even seen another male character who was into D&MM though? I don’t think we’ve seen a situation in which he COULD have done the same thing to a male character.
The only super D&MM fans I’ve seen in the strip are Walky, Dorothy, and Joyce.
Yes, he theoretically could, but he doesn’t and Occam’s razor in this case favors the regularly observed social phenomenon rather than the Occam’s big paisley tie* of the theoretical possibility of him being like this with dude fans (and that wouldn’t prove much other than this is, as is observed, about a geek form of machismo and “proving how smart he is” by engaging in it).
I mean, I really am not saying he’s a bad person. Rather that he is stumbling into some annoying frequently occurring behavior unintentionally.
I mean, that’s the deal of privilege. Doing something unintentionally frustrating for a group because it’s not really on your radar in the same way and it doesn’t feel out of the norm to the person doing the behavior.
I find this disingenuous. Basically saying that it has to be sexism because we’ve never seen him react in a similar situation with a male character, when he has NEVER BEEN IN THAT SITUATION is hardly Occam’s Razor.
There is a difference between an equally plausible answer (he would do it to anyone, and we don’t know otherwise because he has never been in that situation in the comic), and an entirely unlikely big paisley tie explanation.
“Wally is behaving in a way that is common of people in this demographic” is occam’s razor. “Wally is different and doesn’t engage in sexism through magical means of understanding the problems while still looking like he reinforces them in every way” is a paisley tie.
It doesn’t even honestly matter if he ‘does this to everyone’. It just makes him even more insufferable. Neither of us is saying he is a secret misogynist in his heart of hearts. He’s reinforcing bullshit gatekeeping on women. Whether that’s his intention actually doesn’t matter. Whether that’s the net effect of /his/ actions doesn’t actually matter. Whether he acknowledges it or not, he exists in a culture that does some misogynist shit. When he does the same shit, he’s reinforcing that culture – regardless of exigent circumstances.
These aren’t, by any means, high crimes, but they do indicate you shouldn’t be doing this kind of gatekeeping, period. Nothing good comes of it.
“But for Stryker, mutilation is at once a badge of honour and a counter to the myth of nature in a pure state. There is no body without debilitation and pain. We are all made up of endlessly permuting bits and pieces which sometimes do, mostly do not, align with each other. We are all always adjusting, manipulating, perfecting, sometimes damaging (sometimes perfecting and damaging) ourselves.”
damn
(yikes at some of the letters by TERFs/TERF sympathizers at the end though)
Batman TAS (from memory)
Robin: It’s Christmas eve — nothing is happening — let’s go home and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the 1000th time.
Batman: I’ve never seen it. I couldn’t get past the title.
Yeah, I’ve been in arguments like this. Where the two of us go so deep into philosophy and meta-culture that most people’s eyes just glaze over and they walk away.
I really like all the small touches here. That Carla is annoyed at the idea that she would actually hurt someone, and her main argument for why she loved Ultra Car isn’t that it was funny, but for impact it had on her and had a lot of smart stuff to say about gender roles. I could rattle on about why I love Steven Universe for an hour before I actually got to talking about the plot or the characters.
I just really hope Carla isn’t like me… The idea that I’m a ragemonster who would actually hurt people has come up a lot in my life, and I utterly hate it, because, well, I’m trying desperately to be tiny and cute and unscary. It’s something trans girls face a lot. =<
Yeah, I’m thinking that’s why Carla was so offended that Dorothy thinks she would actually hurt Walky, and why her way of asserting power is through being a wacky unstoppable badass prankster. Like Mary says, Carla could have done anything, and Carla strikes back by hitting her in the face with a pie and spelling her name in lights.
And I think it creates a really interesting character, where Carla knows that she’s going to get shit and has to assure people that she’s unthreatening, but also refuses to take anything lying down.
I don’t think anyone actually THINKS Carla’ll murder them, I think it’s just hyperbole and Carla knows it. She’s just very good at including it into her side of the arguments.
Although her reasoning is awesome, and explains why when she does prank it’s not meant to harm.
Yeah, it builds a very interesting form of activism she’s doing where she makes sure there is always a response to aggression that is thorough and discourages the person harassing her from continuing the harassment, but is also aggressively non-violent and leaves little room for those she retaliates against to claim they have been attacked (not that that stopped bigots from trying to argue that Carla is a “violent man who physically assaulted Mary” because of the pie to the face).
And it makes a lot of sense, because it seems well informed by her identity and her likely background and is the sorta thing I’d sometimes see in the politically aware trans college kids I would mentor.
3-I –
I identify with that so much, cause that pressure can get really annoying at times and I tend to get it double because I’m DID as well which adds a whole ‘nother layer to the anger policing (because somehow despite having a 20+ year record of never losing my cool in a dangerous way, I must always be an inch away from snapping like in the movies, right?). Add to that having a longtime partner who didn’t allow me to express any strong emotions whatsoever and especially not anger, even if directed at fucked up things happening to me and would berate me if I showed the slightest hint that things bothered me (she had her own mental health reasons for doing that, but still it was a bit rough) and having a very large butch frame… It adds up to some crippling accumulated baggage about showing my anger in person.
And it means internalizing way too many things that upset me and worrying way too much about coming off as “aggressive” in my responses to things that are upsetting.*
*One of the nastiest traps for trans women is that if we ever dare yell and scream about all the accumulated transphobia that gets heaped on us, we get dinged for “showing our true colors” and “revealing our male aggression” and that gets used to deny our gender as well as the anger. And we tend to get hit with the “girls aren’t allowed to be angry” trope on top of that bullshit.
Can the last panel of the previous comic and the first panel of this one be a t-shirt? Or at least the first panel of this one?
“Dead people can’t know that I totally *owned* them.” is awesome but I will never be able to use it since no one is going to accuse me of wanting to kill someone.
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btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
confirming that the reason there's been no Galaxy Version female characters in Blokees until now is that they felt they needed to make Round Lady Thighs For Ladies
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 11h
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
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Has Ultra Car been snatched up by Netflix yet? I gotta see it now! =[
ULTRA CAR SPEAKS TO ME
Ultra Car was okay, but it’s no Batman TAS.
Yep, Ultracar is Beware the Batman. Called it yesterday
no, ultracar is zeta project
Of course not! Batman TAS was an unoriginal adaptation of a franchise that was old BEFORE ITS TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC’S PARENTS WERE BORN. You can’t be visionary when you’re hobbled to the pa-
*this user has been banned by the site admin*
People said that? Like not sarcasticly?
Batman TAS is one of the sacred cows of nerd dom, but there might have been an iconoclast.
I wonder how it /does/ rate at originality. I don’t really know enough about batman, nor remember the series, well enough to say.
Gave us Harley Quinn, a not one-dimensional Mr Freeze, and probably a bunch of other touches.
It gave us Harley Quinn, who gave us the immortal line “Doncha wanna ride your Harley?”, which is the greatest thing to ever somehow make it past network censors.
“Ride” was the one that didn’t make it. “Rev up” was what they substituted.
Did she then look at the camera and say: “Goodnight everybody.”?
No, sorry, the greatest thing to ever somehow make it past network censors was Animaniac’s “finger Prince” joke.
Renee Montoya was also created for TAS, though the comics writers liked her so much they added her in an issue which came out before her first appearance in the show.
*pssst* hey, if you’re looking for an original batman series to wrap your head around, try this *opens coat* “The Batman” cartoon network series in the early 2000s. It kept characters relevant while evolving plotline with introductions to beloved villains. The only series for the discerning masked vigilante
.
I’m really not. Batman is usually horrible, regardless of the quality of the entertainment he’s in. Quite possibly one of my least favorite fictional entities. But the thought did occur to me that it’s possible that one of nerd-dom’s sacred cows might not actually be /good/. That certainly does happen.
Batman horrible?!…….I’d say that’s mostly up to whoever writes him. Although he has had some pretty ass backwards interpretations.
For what it’s worth, I recently rewatched the entire series, and it did hold up. I didn’t have a single moment of “I liked THIS as a child? What the hell drugs was I on?”. Some episodes were better, some were a bit worse, the afterschool special episode stuck out like a sore thumb, but none of them were plain bad.
Every character is given some depth, though being a cartoon there’s no genuinely cartoonish villain I can recall, even the Joker and Croc have their moments of humanity.
Not every episode is a masterpiece, and I’m sure there are things to be found that can be criticised, but overall, Batman TAS is good.
Seems to me that calling a character others like “horrible” would be the type of thing Dorothy would warn against. But I guess we have a pretty good comments section that didn’t blow that out of proportion.
Like all nerd fights, it takes two.
Uh, okay. Meanwhile I’m going to sit here, an American terrified of vigilante justice because people see Batman and Rorschach and think COOL!, and one of those is actually a thing the narrative is usually saying.
I really couldn’t care less what Dorothy would have to say (not the least of which because she is enamored with a vigilante right now). And I REALLY don’t care about what you have to say because nerd fights are the worst thing ever. The automatic assumption that nerds should like batman irritates me, because it is almost always uncritical.
And here ^ is where the reason why you hate it becomes clear: it’s not the execution, nor the depth, nor anything to do with the series as a experience – your problem with it stems from a apparent loathing of the concept of vigilante justice. Fair enough, though I would be remiss to not point out that Batman:TAS was nothing if not accepting of other’s differences and was quite adamant in preaching understanding of even your perceived foes. I also think it’s the first cartoon I remember that had bisexual characters. I (am pretty sure I) understand your concern, but it is misplaced.
Yes. I said as much. I indicated *BATMAN* is horrible, “Regardless of the quality of his entertainment”. I take no position on whether a given Batman thing I don’t remember is GOOD. *Batman*, the idea, and what he consistently stands for, is horrible.
I have no opinion on Batman:TAS. I don’t dislike it, and I don’t like it. I academically asked whether it was actually TEH SUPAR ORIGINAL (which it clearly wasn’t; that’s fine and all, but my point was less ‘it’s bad for this’ and more ‘and that’s fine, because originality isn’t important’), and whether it might be good. I offer no values on that goodness, because I don’t know. But whether or not Batman:TAS is good, Batman is basically horrible. It’s nigh-on unicorn rare for Batman to be presented as a broken individual who is causing harm. Because he’s the hero of the franchise.
And whether Batman:TAS ‘accepts other people’s differences’, has nothing to do with the simple core of “Broken man afflicting his brokenness on everything around him”. Batman is the person with the least excuse to become the superhero he did – his origin story is “Something traumatic happened to me, so I will ultimately inflict similar trauma on other children elsewhere in order to prevent the exact same trauma from happening again.”
He could have entered politics and done more good than his standard street sweeping, until we get to “Gotham is sick and broken because of an ancient magic curse”, which postdates TAS by at least 15 years or more. His ARCHVILLAIN is someone who, in TAS, is someone who would have done FAR less harm if Bats had never gotten involved. The Joker was just a smart crook until batman knocked him into an acid vat (But technically didn’t kill him!) Now he’s The God Damned Joker, who I’m pretty sure isn’t quite an omnicidal maniac in TAS, but is still fucking evil in ways well beyond “I kill money and kill when it’s more convenient to do so”. And The Joker is not the only Rogue he made worse than has to be, assuming the Standard Mr. Freeze Origin Plot.
But yeah no, tell yourself that Batman is Fine and I, Rutee, Should Be Okay With Him because you called him Politically Correct. My problem with Batman is that he’s a vigilante who primarily concerns himself with, on a time-basis, low-level villains. I have the same problem with Spiderman. They’re doing the least useful plausible vigilante thing, that they don’t even have an excuse to invest heavily in, and in Batman’s case, Batman has the power to do far more good within the law.
You don’t understand my concern. And don’t you dare try to claim Harley (and maybe Ivy?) being bi as the show being fine in every respect. Given that it took them 20 fucking years to actually say that was canon (Which, whether I like it or not, is EXTREMELY important to not getting harrassed by nerds), they score no fucking points for it. Especially not when I’m reasonably confident it wasn’t intended – this isn’t relevant to its value to gay or bi people, but it’s DAMNED sure relevant to whether we give people kudos for it.
I’m not going to say you should be okay with him. However, I am one person who loved Batman TAS while strongly disliking most other Batman media because 1. other media doesn’t usually hammer home that Bruce has a problem and being Batman is not healthy, and 2. TAS’s batman is not this forever gritty grimdark douchebag punching all the criminals, he also funds rehabilitation programs (as Bruce) and actively tries to help criminals getting back onto the right path if they want to.
This Tumblr post better describes why I love TAS while not caring much for the Bat’s other interpretations: http://kryallaorchid.tumblr.com/post/85762466740/fabula-unica-underwater-carpentry
Such anger. Suppose I’ll leave it at that since you’re clearly upset and there’s no point in escalating this by further debate. Good day.
At a glance, you kinda contradict yourself. At first you say that Batman is the hero and as such cannot be shown to be a broken individual who inflicts harm by his actions. A few paragraphs later you go out and and say that Batman makes some situations worse and causes some of the villains to do more harm than if he hadn’t intervened.
And yeah, you may well be right about the joker in B:TAS (though not about Mr. Freeze, and I’m not sure B:TAS follows the “acid vat” origin story, the Joker has had so many backstories that it’s essentially impossible to say which is the true canonical one, but I digress…), but the series doesn’t gloss over it imo, and in one episode even makes it a major plot point that ultimately remains unanswered, leaving it up to the viewer to make up their own mind. Yes, Batman is the protagonist, and usually ends up being a net benefit if you consider harm done versus harm prevented, but he has his critics even among the good guys. Bullock is the main one there, and while it’s tempting to dismiss him as a fat, cliched, donut-devouring sourpuss, he’s also shown to be courageous, unbribeable, and a very efficient investigator.
When you say that Batman’s motivation amounts to “Something traumatic happened to me, so I will ultimately inflict similar trauma on other children elsewhere in order to prevent the exact same trauma from happening again” you’re just being silly. I don’t recall Batman killing anyone’s parents in front of them, so… yeah. You’re exaggerating there to the point where you make no sense any more. Dial back a bit and maybe we can have a fruitful discussion about that.
As for the lesbian relationship between Harly and Ivy not havin been intended… My pet theory is that it was pushed past the execs and regulatory bodies by making it so overt and ham-fisted that it went right through people’s legs (as opposed to over their heads). It may not have been a planned effort by the studio or DC Comics, but someone on the creative team definitely wanted to put it out there.
The appeal of vigilante superhero comics is that a desire for things to be that simple. At least in my opinion. I’m not fond of Batman (mostly because the whole, better than everyone at everything thing is just tiresome), but Spider-Man for instance is a character I really do enjoy.
Life isn’t that simple, but it would be nice if it was.
And what do you think about the X-Men. A team that is hated and hunted for what they are, who do practice vigilante justice, but specifically because the government is unable or unwilling to deal with the problems surrounding a minority.
Yes, in reality, that would be somewhat horrifying. But in fiction. It’s a nice bit of power fantasy. It’s a complex problem simplified into a bit of wish fulfilment.
(Also, technically, the 60s TV show Batman was not a vigilante at all, he worked with the police and government, so maybe all incarnations don’t fit under your original hatred (this is meant mostly as a joke))
Basically, sometimes I wish we could just punch evil in the face.
Whether someone is ‘a’ hero and ‘the’ hero narratively are totally dissimilar things, so no, I didn’t contradict myself. He is generally a bastard. The narrative generally treats what he does as right. These are two things that don’t have to relate to each other, but in his case, generally do. Batman can, and does, suggest morally reprehensible bullshit and the universe will say “yeah that’s about right, good call Bats.”
If TAS is an exception, great. It might hold up for /me/ if I rewatched it (which I’m not going to. I spend most of my free time playing video games, not watching TV. Nothing agin’ it, it’s just not what I do.) But Batman, as a whole, generally has this as an enormous problem.
And no, Batman doesn’t kill people’s kids in front of them. That’s why I said he avoids doing the EXACT SAME THING. What he does, is he throws them off in prison, for what is by the numbers, more likely a crime of necessity than anything else. He’s denying kids their parents – he’s just not doing it by murder. Hence, ‘similar’. What happened to him is worse, sure. I don’t see why that justifies his bullshit street sweeping, especially given that he seems to know it doesn’t do anything in most iterations (hence the damn speeches on how the city is dying etc etc). I’m not ‘exaggerating’. I’m just uncomfortably aware of what it is prison actually IS in the USA, and where crime generally comes from. Arkham Asylum actually doesn’t stand in much better, given that it seems to be where Joker’s gangmates come from, even if prior to going crazy trying to understand the joker, Harley was genuinely trying to help people.
As far as the X-Men, they’re more interesting for how they play into respectability politics than they are for using their superpowers. Given that the ones who seem to get slots on the team are usually capable of rather absurd bullshit, them fighting back against civilians strikes me as the definition of excessive force, but I’m pretty sure Sentinels are actually a thing that cartoon didn’t make up, so there’s at least that. As far as I’m aware, the X-Men usually just fight supervillains, which when they’re not The Black Panthers but Mutant-flavored, is fine. Batman and Spider Man don’t have problems where they’re fighting supervillains either, /by and large/ (The Acid-vat story, regardless of it’s SUPER TRUE CANONICITy, bc I give a fuck about canon, and Mr. Freeze, are the exceptions here). Supervillains represent a threat you actually need something superhuman /for/. It’s what makes them /super/villains (and yeah this probably makes some bat rogues questionable, since I don’t remember all their schticks. I guess Nigma might have stolen the crown jewels or something important in an episode at least?) There’s nothing disproportionate about that, and since supervillain motivations are often not remotely grounded in anything realistic (Chairface Chippendale wanted to get his name on the moon!), there’s little else to be said. Where they start to mirror real world groups, you can have problems (Everything I’ve seen of the X-Men indicates a very tumultuous relationship with groups like the Black Panthers, sometimes recognizing that respectability politics is bullshit, sometimes buying into establishment groups), but even where supervillains /have/ human motives, they’re still generally doing something wrong that ‘has’ to be solved with violence.
So, bringing /that/ back to Batman, in theory, if he spent his time politicking and basically didn’t bother with small thugs (Whom fall under the province of the police, and which he’s not really doing much about with crime fighting measures anyway), I’d actually be fine with him. Then he dons the suit because let’s say, Ivy’s robbing the zoo. And that can /work/ as a cartoon.
Batman is a superhero I’m pretty against, but Batman in a Giant Robot (Roger Smith, of Big O) works fine, because he’s not, you know, broken and inflicting his broken on Paradigm. Heck, while his giant robot often punches out other giant robots, a lot of the problem solving is ultimately about other matters entirely, and the only person who ends up in prison is the well-to-do thief with a giant robot who’s doing it just because he can. And while itd oesn’t have to work out THAT nicely for the non-super villains, it… definitely ought to be closer than the whole ‘grab them all, throw them in prison, THAT will prevent a child from going through the trauma I did (while neatly ignoring the similar trauma I’m causing because I didn’t kill anyone to do it)’
Actually, with the more well written Batman stories, he isn’t dealing with the petty theft people and the joe shmoe criminals. On more than one occasion he tries to give people a second chance, sometimes as Batman and sometimes as Bruce Wayne. The “normal” people Batman targets are usually Mafia types, only going for the lesser dregs of the group usually to get intel on what is going on.
He doesn’t deal with crime of necessity types unless their necessity is something a bit more dangerous or again mob related. The best written Batman iterations are not the vigilante thug Batman, but the one who listens and tries to help as both identities.
I will admit there are often depictions of Batman in terms of only his more action oriented BASH ALL CRIMINALS EFFORTLESSLY BRAA… Usually the movies and videogames… and part of the 90’s dark and gritty stages… But the Batman I know (and I do not claim to be the outright expert so I know things will be picked apart) knows when to try to talk as well as when to kick butt. He knows the system is broken and corrupt, but he is trying to fix it as best as he can while keeping the broken parts form getting more and more out of control. It ends up being cylindrical (with both the prisons and Arkham creating and bolstering the ranks of the villains), but he does try to fix those issues on the outside (Bruce Wayne) and the inside (Batman).
… Someone not claiming The Batman is an affront to all things Batty? Wow.
“The Batman” was pretty good. It kinda turned into “The Justice League” in the final season but that’s usually how Batman do anyway.
I liked The Batman a lot…but I tend to keep that quiet, because this was Not A Popular Opinion back when the show was on the air, and thus people were discussing it more than occasionally.
I liked The Batman, once I accepted it wasn’t “More B:TAS but we’re calling it something else now”. I got the impression a lot of people never did.
I also liked B:TBATB. Still on the fence about Beware the Batman, though.
I’m surprised that somebody’s acknowledging it at all. It’s the only Batman cartoon I ever saw, and I don’t really see people talking about it.
Seriously though, The Batman was actually way better than I thought it would be when I first saw commercials. The Clayface origin/evolution was actually really emotionally impactful.
I watched a few episodes of ‘The Batman’. The first three, to be precise. I’m fine with changing the characters, but those three were just so… Predictable. Also, it felt kinda dumb to have The Penguin acting as an intimidating physical opponent to friggin’ Batman. (The Joker was a little iffy, but at least it kinda-sorta fit.)
I got into The Batman a few years ago. One thing I really liked is how they had Batgirl start as the sidekick BEFORE Robin. She was an excellent character, put to very good use on the Maxie Zeus episode.
Yeah, the series didn’t have the psychological depth of B:TAS, but it was pretty fun at times.
I also would point out the cool tie of Poison Ivy to Batgirl to give her a better personal nemesis than Kiler Moth.
Agreed, though I’m sad they didn’t do quite as much with that connection as B:TAS did with Bruce/Harvey.
Should I be concerned that you’re carrying those around under your coat…?
It’s partly (some would say solely) responsible for how we see the character Batman portrayed today. It was dark Batman in a time where the most recognizable version of him was the Adam West tv show and Superfriends.
…does it not postdate The Dark Knight Returns?
*Checks*
It does. So no, this isn’t really an indicator towards ‘originality’ (I should clarify, ‘originality’ is kind of pointless and not actually a concern of mine, but I did wonder if it was true.
Ah, and yes, it probably is partially responsible for Dark Batman in public perception, in that it helped keep it alive in the public in the middle of… very silly Batman movies (I’m pretty sure he was better remembered for… wozzit, Batman and Robin? Where Ivy kills people by making out with them? Either way, recent movies, not Adam West), so they were less shocked with the Nolan movies. Definitely not solely, but almost definitely partially.
the first Keaton Batman movie was an earnest attempt to make Batman serious, following the trend in the comics at the time (just as 60s Batman, for all that we mock it now, was a mirror of the comics of ITS time, and for that we can pretty much thank Wertham and the Comics Code for forbidding anything more serious *spit*). It’s a bit silly in spots nevertheless, but unintentionally so. The really silly stuff didn’t start to creep in until, oh, the third movie.
Really, the 1989 Batman influences are pretty clear, including the reuse of Danny Elfman’s fantastic new theme for the character, the design of the Batmobile, etc etc.
Yeah, I was pretty sure we were in full on SERIOUS GRIM Batman mode at this point, comic-wise. And yeah, even as a kid I could tell it wasn’t supposed to be silly it just… was. Well, BnR, anyway, I don’t really remember anything about the others, though I’d be impressed if the Riddler one was serious, which you seem to be indicating it wasn’t, and the Penguin one was not something I was allowed to see, but looked serious.
Batman (1989): Michael Keaton and Joker (Jack Nicholson).
Batman Returns (1992): Keaton, Penguin (Danny DeVito) and Catwoman (Michelle Pfieffer).
Batman Forever (1995): Val Kilmer, Riddler (Jim Carrey) and Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones).
Batman and Robin (1997): George Clooney, Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman).
that last one killed the franchise until Nolan revived it in 2005, 8 years later.
@StClair actually, if I remember correctly, the original plan for the 60’s Batman was a serious take with the actor from the then recent Tarzan as Bats, but then Hugh Hefner(I may have misspelled his name, but I don’t care enough to look it up) showed the really old campy Batman movie at a party. This caused a bunch of people to set up showings at colleges and stuff (like some sort of proto-hipsters). Seeing the popularity of this campy Batman, the series was retooled before the Tarzan actor even had two pictures taken in the Batsuit. So actually, despite Adam West’s Batman bringing the character and comics more attention, the comics regressed back out of a newly refound seriousness to mirror the show.
I learned that ‘fun’ fact from a comics history class, so I figured I’d share.
I wonder how the rest of the world is doing?
(Golf clap)
i think the thing i liked about it is that it really…played with the short story format in interesting ways? like i guess what i’m comparing it to internally is Twilight Zone, although TZ was probably much better. but it ended up doing a lot of character studies that were just. really good for cartoons, i think. there are a lot of people who end up liking the villains much better than batman because they were allowed to…screw up, essentially. and there’s something very cathartic about that. i feel like it really codified Batman as He Should Be – ethical traumatized isolated dude with too much money, hahaha.
but, yeah, a lot of the love probably holds to nostalgia. which, i don’t think is necessarily a bad reason to love something, but you gotta know what you’re doing, as with most things. sometimes you love something for how terrible it is.
and then sometimes you love something because, screw the system, nobody can stop you. exhibit a: my stephanie brown avatar
…honestly i would Not Be Surprised if a lot of the love for batman tas comes from how terrible most comic books are
The best thing about Batman:The Animated Series (at least in my opinion) is the art direction and story telling. It was much more dark than many animated shows of its time, even up until now, and was very “film noir” in its direction. I am a fan of Batman, but it was the animated series that made me curious. Of course if you don’t care for Bruce Wayne period you’re SOL haha. It’s worth it for the art at least.
that scene with Two-Face and the lightning strike sent chills down my spine, hahahaa. and Joker’s Favor is absolutely a classic. also i really love Mask of the Phantasm and can never get over Bruce believing he doesn’t deserve to be happy like NO, DON’T, BRUCE, NO, IT’S OKAY, YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MISERABLE, GDI GET A THERAPIST. and batman beyond is such a good continuation
there are a lot of things to love about it! the art deco stylization is so distinctive and i’m never going to get over the title sequence in MotP being just the credits sung backwards or like. just the title sequence from btas. that’s such beautiful storytelling, so short and succinct and perfect. but yes
zoelogical: All of this.
There was a bit in the comic that ran alongside the (animated) Justice League where the Phantom Stranger shows Flash (who got in an argument with Batman earlier) what Bruce’s first Christmas after Crime Alley was like. He opens all his expensive presents from Alfred without enthusiasm, until he gets to the Grey Ghost playset. And for a moment, he’s a little boy again, jumping around the living room with the toy plane…
And then little Bruce catches sight of that big portrait of his parents over the mantel. And says, “I’m sorry.” For forgetting his vow. For being happy. Just for a moment.
He thanks Alfred (not noticing the tear the latter sheds) and asks him to please take care of the presents, while he goes downstairs to train some more. And a much chastened Flash quietly tells the Stranger he’s seen enough.
StClair: :(((((((((((
that’s almost as sad as The Brave and the Bold Bruce origin story
Hm, I guess that’s possible, but I would think it’d be a hard thing to notice for a kid (at least, in the same way; like, I think most of my objections wouldn’t occur to a kid, but it still might be deeply unentertaining for them). TAS did air for a long time in syndication, right? Folks coulda easily gone back to it later, if it did, after trying out batman comics.
Definitely possible. I mean, no idea if it’s true, but possible.
i did kind of come to it as a college student, hahaha. i was probably a newborn when BTAS started airing, and I never had cable or Cartoon Network growing up.
i think kids – especially young kids – would probably process it more on an aesthetic level. like a lot of toddlers don’t necessarily understand everything that’s going on in a Disney movie, but they can see the pretty princess and the prince and the villain and understand what’s going on. Or understand that there are good robots and bad robots and how cool they are as they fight each other in SPACE or on EARTH. so you’d see the Dark Avenger and how smart he is as he figures out who the bad guy is and then also feel weirdly sad for the bad guy but end up putting him in jail. and then you’d be cool because of the batmobile and the great music.
you’d just have to be the kind of person into superheroes or supervillains, probably. and be interested by the noir elements. or maybe you saw the batman movies and were like “this is cool” and then you got to have a steady stream of merchandisable batman.
but mostly what i meant about the cartoon being better than the comics is that comics!Batman in the 90s was just. such an asshole. like you know how BBC Sherlock is – he was worse. he did much more manipulative shady shit, and literally everyone was at his beck and call. he was the Maryest of Mary Sue male power fantasies and i’m…not sure how much that’s changed but, like, at least they include other people in those power fantasies now. (for how long?? who KNOWS. god. i cry. comics are a disaster.
comics were a mistake.)but where comics tend to be up and down in quality, btas was a steady stream of reliable good content. the animated verse, anyways. (talk to me about the comics no don’t don’t talk to me i can’t. i cannot.)
(okay on a level i love how absolutely absurd comics are but that’s also. so frustrating.)
Personally I preferred Batman Beyond, but I’m a cyberpunk geek.
Oh yeah, Beyond is fantastic, but it also has a lot of weak episodes and suffers greatly from the not entirely interesting Rogues Gallery, the way that B:TAS was defined by its fantastic, memorable cast of villains who carried the show more than Batman himself.
I think my favourite episode was the one where all the kids of Gotham get sent to a reform school that basically abuses them into compliance, and I think the show would have been stronger had it ran with more of those.
For basically being Spider-Bat Akira, Terry ended up being so goddamned fantastic that he eclipses a lot of DC’s output since. Not bad for a character born from an executive mandated “Batman in High School” show.
Batman:TAS was so good it redefined a lot of characters for the comics. It made Clock King into a good villain.
Batman TAS premiered my freshman year of college, most of the guys in my wing of the dorm would gather in the residence hall meeting room to watch it on the big tv before we headed to the cafeteria for supper.
Greatest thing ever when it was new!
All this talk of B:TAS and nobody recognizes the greatness that was DCAU Superman.
IT WAS BETTER THAN BATMAN, DANGIT. THIS IS A HILL I WILL DIE ON.
I might also agree with you. Like, Superman was, at least, pretty consistent. At its worst it was boring. But, like, BTAS had some reeeeally stinker episodes. And sometimes its quality was all over the place. You never know if the next episode is going to be amazing or, y’know, The Cape And Cowl Conspiracy.
It just depends on if one is personally more enamored with having singularly great episodes like Heart of Ice, despite the terrible valleys of I Am The Night, or if instead they’d rather have something that’s more regular and more polished.
Oh yeah, when B:TAS had its highlights, “Almost Got ‘Im”, “Heart of Ice”, “Perchance to Dream”, “Joker’s Favor”, “The Man Who Killed Batman”, some of this is in the All Time Greats for western animation. Also then you get the mutated farm animals episode or where Catwoman gets turned into a furry.
I tend to prefer arc based shows, so Superman spending the entire series building up to the Fourth World, with Michael Ironside as DARKSEID, while also having long arcs devoted to Lex Luthor and Brainiac in their most perfect incarnations across any medium, on top of having a lot of really good standalones, like the Mr. Mxyzptlk episodes and the Late Mr. Kent where Superman has to solve his own murder, dang it was just great. It had the unfortunate fate of being sandwiched between B:TAS and Justice League, the two peaks of the DCAU, but more people need to give S:TAS a shot.
‘Cause any show that can turn Toyman into a horrifying badass deserves some cred.
S:TAS was right up there with B:TAS for me, though I saw it much later, as I’m pretty sure it was produced quite a few years after B:TAS.
As for ‘better’… well, as you both pointed out, it had more focus on arcs and it was more consistent, yet on the other hand B:TAS had some gems one can never forget. Thankfully we don’t have to choose and can actually watch BOTH during one lifetime, as they both rank high on the must-see western animation list.
B:TAS started the climb to quality, Superman took it and flew with it.
JL/JLU damn near perfected it.
No, Ultra Car was no BTAS. SPIDER-CAR on the other hand…
Let me see if I know how this works. *ahem*
Ultra Car was just a cheap knock-off of Go-Bots, which was itself an even cheaper knock-off of Transformers, which was a cheesy ripoff of the greatest show ever: ULTRAMAN!
But Ultraman was just a ripoff of a Twilight Zone episode.
Which was based on a far superior Golden Age science fiction pulp magazine story.
If you dig deep enough, it all goes back to an ancient Greek Myth! Where do you think “God from the machine” refers to? ROBOT AI!
So it all goes back to Zeus not keeping it under his tunic?
Zack Tilly!!
Sheesh…it always goes back to Zeus, doesn’t it.
If it is Western influenced, you can follow it to Ouranos and Gaea eventually. If it’s Eastern, you’ll eventually find bits of Journey to the West.
So it is written.
And in every story, looking hard enough, you’ll find the Epic of Gilgamesh as well.
“Gilgamesh and Enkidu… at Uruk.”
“Picard and Dathon… at El-Adrel.”
“Carla and Walky… at Reed Hall.”
Epic battles, all.
Ah, divine satyromania – the origin of everything entertaining ever.
Technically those references don’t go together, though. Picard and Dathon were fighting alongside each other (as probably were Gilgamesh and Enkidu unless that was their first meeting – been a while since I read any EoG), whereas Carla and Walky are on opposite sides.
(Technically you could argue that they’re both fighting ‘with’ each other in some creative wordplay à la the Hamilton opening number, but I feel like that conflicts with how the reference-as-communication was handled in Darmok…)
/pedantry
Good observation. I’ll take that hit.
Carla, like Granny Weatherwax, will leave you alive because how else will you KNOW you’ve been beaten?
… Which, to be fair, makes one wonder when one thinks about a certain quote from Men At Arms, about why it’s much better to be at the mercy of an evil man than a good man…
Not that Granny’d ever call herself ‘good’, I suppose. (Or, she’d probably just point out that ‘good’ and ‘nice’ are not the same thing in the slightest. One of my favorite characters, she is…)
No witch would prefer a dead opponent. They’re like cats that way.
I will always consider it both bad and good that she and Sam Vimes never encountered one another.
Bad because that would be a meeting so epic that it would render all other fiction obsolete.
Good because there’s a strong possibility that the mixing of their personalities might tear the universe asunder. We’re talking “Unstoppable Force meets Immovable Object” here.
Lets be clear here, vimes is in no way immovable, he knows when to duck behind a desk by reading the room
The meeting of the two!
“Hello.”
“Morning, Ma’am.”
*pass each other by.*
I have imagined a plot, details nonexistent as yet, in which Granny and Vimes somehow end up on opposite sides of an issue.
Yeah, that would be terrifying.
I have to know, in this scenario how much of the disc is left afterwards? I’m not gonna bother song who wins because I can’t imagine anyone running in this scenario, but the carnage must be huge.
Winning in this scenario. Freaking auto correct.
You realize, of course, that Vetinari would play them off against each other for grins, giggles–
and, most importantly, profit. Whether in power or money.
…Early Vetinari, maybe. After the end of Men at Arms, he’d be playing it differently while making it look much the same.
(My Vetinari hypothesis, I didn’t write the reply about Night Watch, but I agree with it.)
…I need to work on my local html fu.
I’m thinking it would involve criminal justice and jurisprudence. Someone committed horrible crimes in both Lancre and AM. Granny knows the apprehended suspect is guilty and intends to mete out witch-flavored justice here and now. Vimes insists on doing it by the book. even if that means the perp might weasel his way out…
According to WITCHES ABROAD, Granny does think she’s good; she just sometimes wishes she didn’t have to be. I feel like this explains a lot.
I thought that applied to witches in general.
Walky and Carla are going to come out of this either as arch-enemies or worthy opponents. I hope for the latter.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, one might be a prerequisite to the other.
Defeat Means Friendship!
Set phasers to befriend with extreme prejudice.
see: gary and ash
Or we get a Gilligan Cut to them in bed together, wondering what just happened.
Carla being asexual, gay, and completely out of Walky’s league makes that unlikely.
Yeah, people seem to forget Carla’s orientation a lot when shipping her. I’m really hoping its just due to the assumption of heteronormativity (as in, the assumption that everyone is straight unless stated otherwise) rather than that thing where people don’t tend to believe trans people can be queer because they assume that all trans people are straight.
I dunno, I get suspicious and paranoid sometimes about stuff like that.
I’d be extra worried, given that she’s not only not straight, but she’s not straight in a way that The Straights can’t into in the first place.
Come to think of it, I’d actually be singing it from the rooftops in your exact boots…
I’m just happy no one’s doing the “homoromantic asexual trans woman, that’s not a real orientation” thing yet. Though I suspect we’ll get at least one or two if Carla ever spells the whole thing out directly in the comic.
Bring on her and Sal, IMO. Or Sal and Ruth, I’m pretty on board with those two mixing fighting and fucking and loving every second of it.
I’m actually a bit curious to see Carla’s stance on sex, because Ultra Car was pretty sex averse, but also took a lot of pride in being able to get off her partner, so I wonder if she’ll be a similar thing where she’s into giving but not so much receiving pleasure.
Unfortunately it’s practically inevitable. The further one gets from the range of mean±1σ the longer the string of descriptors inevitably gets if one wishes to be precise, which often is very important when one wishes to find a sexual and/or romantic partner, but also the more knowledge one needs, and often doesn’t have if they’re part of that normative 68%, to parse all of it.
Using myself as an example, I could self-describe as “a heterosexual cis male” and I’d be telling so little as to feel like I was lying while at the same time a fair bit of the population would see that as containing significant redundancies. If I go for the full short form it becomes, “a panromantic heterosexual white cis male Dom sadist with strong ‘daddy type’ aspects and some specific minor masochistic tendencies who is open to polyamory but dedicatedly monosexual.” Much of that is going to confuse, and thereby possibly disturb, people who don’t know how to unpack all of it and who therefore will either make assumptions based in stereotypes or will write near all of it off as actually “not a real thing.”
Oh, oh, ME NEXT!
Short form: cis male (because calling myself heterosexual really doesn’t feel right anymore and I shall not tell a lie).
Long form: pansexual heteroromantic exhibitionistic mostly-cisgendered male ‘Master-slave type’ Dominant with slight sadist tendencies when disobeyed yet also at times a ‘slave-Mistress type’ Submissive with major masochistic tendencies, open to polygamy as long as he is the ‘central link’.
Well, that was fun. ^_^
When has the canon sexuality of characters ever stopped the shippers?
gently raises hand
I missed it wherever it was mentioned, for what that’s worth, and I’m usually pretty aware of character orientation, since mine’s mildly unusual.
Sexuality has nothing to do with shipping. NOTHING.
Ask the Winchesters or Kirk. Ask ANY character famous enough to be shipped.
Or they could just be shipping with no regard to canon!
I mean, you get ships between two straight characters of the same gender all the time. I suspect there is a discrepancy that favors higher % heterosexual ships for homosexual characters that’s not really noted because of the lack of homosexual characters in general, but still, shipping is not really about who could get it on in canon. You could even say it favors non-canon pairings.
If you ship two straight people together you still get literally all of fiction for your straight fix. The reverse doesn’t exist for queer representation.
It’s the difference between Human Torch being played by Michael Jordan and Black Panther being depicted by a white man.
To be fair, what I have seen of shipping culture so far, it doesn’t seem to consider sexualities very much. Or rather, at all.
yeah, if it’s not possible in canon due to any reason, for example sexual orientation or even physical location (different universes), it’s just a ‘crack ship’ and is still allowed. =)
I don’t know – what is more acute hate sex than hate sex with someone who hates you and hates sex?
Unless they also enjoy it in a hateful way, there is no point.
I was thinking mutual hate fueled binge Ultracar/Monkeyman & Dexter marathon. But sure, sex works too.
Now I can’t but help but imagine both happening simultaneously.
And Dorothy suddenly has more time to study
Or stuck in the middle wondering – what the [censored] happened?
Get Joyce up in here, we can get UltraHymnKey going on Tumblr (Dumblr?) and the true spirit of SuperWhoLock will be restored at last.
(UltraMonNul? UltraDexNul? UltraHymnDex? No, that’s a software package.)
Oooh yeah.
She discovered monkey with Walky, now Carla has to help her see the light too !
Prediction: Walky will prepare a thirty-page essay to prove the point and nail it to Carla’s door a la Martin Luther. In the process of researching he will learn the Power of Studying. And then promptly forget it because all-nighters are like that.
YES. THIS. MAKE IT SO!
“You thought that it was Dorothy, but it was me, Carla!”
“It was me Walky! It was me the whole time, Walky!”
I know I’m now (friend)shipping them.
Part of me is seeing Carla follow Dorothy and Walky to Gender studies class one day and continuing this argument, only to have Leslie win out all of them.
Thusly, NEEEEEEEEERDS
Ah, the sweet sound of fanrage.
These are my people.
Nerd respect.
Oh Dorothy, be careful what you wish for…
Segue to an update on Amber?
This is clearly the most important conversation ever had.
I hope it lasts the rest of the week.
We’ll move on through the rest of the storylines for the day and every time we pass this part of the hall, Walky and Carla will be deep in this argument.
Actually, looking at the preview panels, this puts a different cast on the shots of an upset Carla. Maybe Mary doesn’t do anything else horrible today and it’s just an argument over cartoons.
Do you mean this particular instance of it in this particular dorm with these particular speakers, or do you mean the gestalt of all the near-identical conversations on the subject that have been had over the past several years?
GEEKWAR HAS BEEN INITIATED
ROLL FOR INITIATIVE.
…fuck, a 2.
I forgot my red d20 hates being rolled on nonorganic surfaces.
…what kind of organic surfaces do you roll it on?
(Okay, it’s probably leather or fabric, but my head is imagining strange things)
Aren’t dice usually rolled on tables? In which case the most likely organic surface would be wood.
Usually wood, but I’ve been thorough in testing it. Chemically treated leather doesn’t seem to count, but rawhide does, as does buckskin tanned with mashed brains. Trials on lacquered wood have been inconclusive.
Were you treating traditional natural lacquer and modern synthetic lacquer as different?
What about any surface that’s been completely shaded over with pencil graphite? Graphite’s organic.
…..
IT IS TOO! ASK A CHEMIST!
I initially read that as nonorgasmic, and my mind went off on a tangent trying to figure out just what kind of games you were playing.
ROCK FALLS, EVERYONE DIES.
Roc dies, everyone falls.
#makeultracargreatagain
no, not that hash tag!! D:
All we need now is for Lucy to stumble upon this sordid scene.
Make it so!
Ruth is aroused from her funk to come enforce the rules against nerdfighting in the halls.
She has them all shipped off to a island in the Amazon where they must fight with improvised weapons.
Dorothy unites them into a tribe, and Carla leads them to conquer the hemisphere with superior prank-based technology.
I… I’d so watch this, actually.
list of things getting less attention than ruth:
Jessica #4
in addition to my previous comment, my gayness for dorothy has also now been firmly cemented.
Nice try, Joyce. The Becky avatar isn’t fooling us.
What are you talking about? Becky’s catty at Dorothy. That’s a foolproof sign right there!
If only she was more than just Republican National Convention gay for her:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/rightfully/
Dorothy is the best.
I am doing fine, Thanks for asking Dorothy.
Nice Joey avatar
If you back away slowly, they’ll never notice you’ve escaped.
Not slowly, RUN! You need to be out of earshot before they decide they want your opinion to back one of them up!
Nah, just out of sight, unless you can’t move quietly.
Their eyes are sensitive to movement.
This is how most internet fandom arguments go. But oh Carla, I feel the same way about Symbionic Titan. That show was well written and had so much potential. Allegedly, the merchandise wasn’t selling so it got cancelled, but I’m not even sure exactly how cancellations and things like that go.
I’m not an expert on the workings of network television but for cartoons it’s usually a mix of merchandise and ratings. Entire cartoons are made just to sell toys. *cough* TRANSFORMERS, POKEMON, MLP, *cough* Original ideas have a much harder time and have to be interesting fast to build a fanbase. That’s why ST died and Ben 10 survived long past it’s expiration date. Also I think CN just didn’t get Tartokofsky for awhile.
Tartakovsky! Creator of Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, And Sym-Bionic Titan. Of course I butcher his last name. Apparently he pitched a few shows to CN that weren’t picked up.
Wow, it has a lot more to do with money than I thought. Although I suppose it makes sense. It’s a shame though – not that I wasn’t into Pokemon when I was a kid.
Pokémon has the benefit of being a tie-in to one of the most successful videogame series ever, it has drawn thousands of kids into playing the games, and it’s old enough that it’s merchandise appeals to both young and old.
The Pokémon anime will never be cancelled.
Create a show just to sell (mumble Action Jackson /mumble) toys? Say it ain’t so!
I told you I was old.
Cough Gundam Cough
Sometimes they cancel it before they even MAKE the merchandise, just because they think girls don’t buy merchandise.
Why girls in particular though? I feel like most of the time, young children are socialized into gender roles – especially in regards to toys geared towards young children. Girls would like the show, it’s just that Mom and Dad and the kids in class think Mecha shows like that aren’t “right” for girls to watch.
It’s sort of the same concept of “fake” Gamer Girls where women can’t possibly play and enjoy video games, where in reality they make up a good percentage of sales. I feel like if you market something specifically for boys, which I feel they would have done regardless, you’re basically shooting yourself in the foot. Like how quite a few politicians are just now realizing women have the right to vote (and make up half any given population) and are scrambling to seem appealing.
Well, mom and dad /are/ the ones doing the toy buying, in the executives’ view, so any fastidiousness on their part is part of the point. Granted, some of their target audience has allowances and can make /some/ independent decisions on this matter, and parents are often not as fastidious as the executives assume.
It ultimately comes down to ‘it’s common wisdom’ most of the time, along with confirmation bias; at least, outside of toys. In theory, it’s possible they’re actually exactly right about toys, but it seems unlikely to me that the exact same justifications that vidya and movie execs offer in contravention to the truth, are actually correct when toy makers deploy them
That makes sense. I feel like from a business perspective you’d try to make as much money as possible, though. In the case of Symbionic Titan, there’s even a female lead (a princess!) who is arguably the main character, so that might be a way to get the more conventional thinking parents to buy toys of the sort for their girls.
You’d try to make the most money possible, yes, but when video game or movie execs offer these justifications, they’re trying to do the same thing. They think that they are making the call that will be most profitable, based on the evidence they know. “Mom won’t buy these toys fro her daughter.”
This is the same Mom that ‘won’t go to see an action movie about a woman’, or the same Mom that ‘won’t play video games with any real action involved’ (It is no longer tenable to claim women won’t play video games, given the smaller market). And those things have been demonstrated to be untrue, even as tendencies. I can see how, in principle, kids legitimately might change the calculus, but I’m not going to assume it will.
The kids aren’t the ones buying the toys themselves, but they’re the ones telling Mom and Dad that they want such and such, “please can I have it? I want it, please???” -that’s usually how it goes, even for the parents who say no for gendered reasons.
I just don’t buy the arguments that the execs in movies and entertainment give – it’s not them being reasonable to me, because “girls” merchandise simply aren’t less valuable.
Think of how much money Disney makes off their princess franchise merchandise, things like Tinkerbell, Minnie Mouse, it wasn’t a mecha show but Frozen made a TON of money – and that movie had a female lead that was obviously strong and powerful and didn’t end up with anyone at all, most of the men were pretty much background characters. I don’t what gender you are, but it might not matter because I bet you’ve seen at least one Disney movie in your life. A princess movie, specifically. When people watch on Netflix, buy VHS or DVD, buy dolls and play sets Disney makes money off that.
Other examples – My little pony, which famously was also consumed by some grown men. Barbie. The Powerpuff Girls. Even stuff that’s not “girly” by comparison: The Hunger Games – main character is a woman. Harry Potter- written by a woman, one of the main characters is female and you bet that franchise is consumed by a lot of women and girls. JRR Tolkien’s works and Peter Jackson’s adaptations. Yu Yu Hakusho. Dragon Ball Z. Samurai Champloo. Inuyasha. Eureka Seven – an actual mecha show, a romantic one at that, that many boys and girls loved. Full Metal Alchemist – is pretty much a prosthetic mecha, mystical show with a male lead, written by a woman and also consumed by a lot of girls and women.
So to me, for Symbionic Titan, with the story and characters, could have been spun any number of ways and people would have bought. If you build it, even if you build it for girls, people will come. A lot of companies in a lot of different realms are missing out because they simply won’t or don’t think to move with the times. As I said before, parents do influence the purchases, but in my mind not nearly as many of those as there are parents who will buy anything for their kids. And the show got cancelled anyway. Why couldn’t they have just taken a small chance, given that NOT selling anything would have gotten the show cancelled.
Cuz they are sexist fuckin assholes.
YOung Justice could have sustained toy profits,
from all the boys alone!
There is literally no justification. They created a well written wildly popular breakout show, and all massive female audience was just profit gravy.
Young Justice is just the kind of show to create a generation of female comic readers. BUT noooo.
dickheads.
That’s what I’m saying. You will not go wrong marketing a gender neutral show. You won’t. There are too many women with money, and there are too many parents with money consuming this stuff. So I don’t understand why execs are still “scared” that their shows don’t get consumed by women and girls. There literally aren’t enough female centric shows and movies in the world, we’re basically forced to consume the other stuff anyway.
The problem is that there’s a prevailing theory amongst marketers that marketing a gender-neutral show means you’re “competing against yourself.” Market segmentation is frankly one of the most unforgivable things in media; the idea of just making something good and accepting the audience you get is unheard-of, because you’re SUPPOSED to be aiming for one demographic at a time. =/
Gender-specific toys are a curious thing. When I was in my teens, I though this bullshit would be done with in ten years time. Now that’s a long time ago and gender specific toy marketing came back with a vengeance.
Teachers have even told me that boys won’t play with a pink super ball because “pink is for girls”. wtf?
It part, it seems to tie in with merchandizing (like Lego which went from a building kit targeted at boys and girls to running lines of merchandizing products for e.g. Star wars that target boys only (or girls only, but I think the sales are down on that stuff, there is only so much you can do with a Bibi and Tina kitchen set).
So, like in other ways, the idea of how girls should be gets in the way of fun.
I think LEGO still is gender neutral. I wouldn’t look at licensed merchandise like LEGO Star Wars or LEGO Batman to judge their business model, because the target of these sets is directly influenced by the target of the products they’re based on.
There IS a strange lack of female LEGO minifigures, though, and I’m not talking about “characters”: go pick a LEGO playset that’s, I don’t know, Police Station or Racing Cars or whatever other generic set: the anonymous, all identical minifigures are mostly male. If there is a female one, she is the exception and alone.
Yeah, that’s part of the point. And when Lego decided “hey, let’s market specifically to girls”, they didn’t start creating normal lines with more female minifigs; instead they created a completely different line with more humanized minifigs, a lot of pink and purple, and a simpler, more rounded aesthetic. It has spinoff lines for Disney Princesses and Elves, and it’s nice to get some different settings in there, but they’re still really clearly meant to be “The Girly Lego”: compare this with this. There’s nothing wrong with pretty elf castle sets per se; I just resent their being set up as The Lego That Girls Will Buy, complete with their Special Figures You Can’t Use With Normal Lego, so we’re not even getting any more female Lego minifigs out of the deal.
(Although on the bright side, when The Force Awakens came out and everyone was going “WHERE ARE THE REY TOYS?” Lego was like “Hey, we have an affordable mini-set just for Rey; how ’bout that?” Good moment in toy marketing, that.)
Pink superballs are the best t whip at your cousin’s head. “OW WHO HIT ME WITH THIS?!” “Couldn’t have been me, mine are orange *silently fiddles with like seven more pink ones stolen from sister in pocket*”
We’ve all hear the Paul Dini interview, right?
(<a href="http://io9.gizmodo.com/paul-dini-superhero-cartoon-execs-dont-want-largely-f-1483758317" Partial transcript on io9 here.)
The “girls don’t buy our toys” argument has problems with it, number one is “you don’t provide them toys,” number two is “just what age group do you think you’re selling to? (i.e., the older ones — including college age — do have money),” and number three is “parents do ask their children what they want, you know.”
As an aside, I miss Young Justice.
Hmm, messed up the link. Here it is in plain form:
http://io9.gizmodo.com/paul-dini-superhero-cartoon-execs-dont-want-largely-f-1483758317
(((HUGS))))
ALL of this
I Miss it too.
From my understanding, now that Netflix is airing YJ, they’ve said if it gets good enough ratings that they’ll order a third season.
Huh. I have a non-streaming account with Netflix. Adding a new season of YJ (along with the other items I’ve been loking at) could make me upgrade my account.
Oh man, I hope so. That cliffhanger at the end of Invasion really needs resolving.
I miss Young Justice too. And yeah, a huge amount of college age (dare I say, millenial) as well as some older folks (comics and anime existed before the 90s ) consume this stuff. And a lot of those people happen to be women too.
Another reason Sym-Bionic Titan and Young Justice got cancelled could be continuity. In shows that have dramatic storytelling and continuity airing them in order is important. You can’t air the second half of a two part finale then jump to a random episode from the next season the next day. It might confuse the audience or *cringe* make them change the channel. Shows like Teen Titans Go, Spongebob, Fairly Odd Parents, Powerpuff Girls have an advantage in that they can show any episode in any order because each episode is it’s own individual thing. Adventure Time was supposed to be like this at one point until it evolved into a show that has strong continuity, yet still each episode is it’s own thing and airing them in order doesn’t matter as much. Same with Regular show, and to a lesser extent MLP:FIM. So there’s another little reason for why good shows can get cancelled. Of course rating and merch sales still matter way more.
The problem with Sym-Bionic Titan as I recall is that they basically forced it to fail.
They claimed toys would never sell before even trying to sell any.
Well starting up a toy line has a bunch of upfront costs. They don’t want to leave those toys sitting on the shelves after they’ve already spent the money to produce them.
Which is ridiculous, because it was pretty dang toyetic. I mean, it had giant robots and robot suits.
That’s what I don’t understand. How could you NOT make a toy out that, even if you didn’t want to market it towards girls. It’s like, do you know how popular transformers toys are? How popular the Gundam series was back in the day? That could be you!!
There is no peaceful solution to this.
Peace was never an option.
peace can be found in this! theres always a way!
There is. stick a syringe full of etorphine in both of them.
…. I’ve been watching too much Person of Interest.
I was told there would be a murder
I’m disappointed!
We were promised mayhem and destruction! Gather the torches and pitchforks!
I demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
Sadly for us all, Carla is an extreme pacifist*.
*Which makes sense given that trans women are really allowed no wiggle room on violence and even defending yourself from attack as a trans woman can land you in jail. Not to mention the way that so many are scouring over trans women’s behavior looking for secret signs of “male reality” in the form of things like violent behavior, anger, or sexual aggressiveness (nobody and I mean nobody hates men more and thinks less of them than transphobes and sexists). Not to mention all the tropes about trans women being scary dangerous crazy people who will kill you and there’s a lot of reasons for Carla to be extra-invested in making her pacifism VERY prominent.
Which is an even bigger shame after we just had the “You don’t have to be perfect to merit concern or respect” thing, all told. It’s a really hard message to avoid, perfection.
Yeah.
Though that one is especially hard to ignore as a trans woman, because that myth of the mystical trans killer is evoked A LOT to justify not only dehumanizing trans women in general and denying their personhood but also their murders.
When people evoke “oh, I was so scared and enraged by that duplicitous evil trans woman, I lost my head” to justify violence against us and demonize our own self-defense. It becomes really hard to shake it off and not add a quick disclaimer to whatever dark joke we were just making.
Especially given how the tiniest failings are proof of your evil.
It makes me see red that the trans panic defense is a thing that exists and hasn’t been thrown out as the bigoted pile of shit it is.
“the mystical trans killer”… what in the actual… . By Odin, where do people get this shit? Suppose I’m quite far removed geographically from where you are, but I didn’t expect to see THIS as a sociocultural difference!
*shakes head*
It’s strange to me that people in general don’t seem to believe women can be violent, unless race and gender are taken into account. I once watched a documentary type show where the white female drug runner played up that she was innocent,basically because she was a pretty young middle class woman struggling to make it as an actress who didn’t know that her Asian best friend was running a small drug trade operation.
All that quick fast money, constant traveling, with luggage she was not allowed to mess with, buying expensive stuff, and she didn’t realize (more like, she didn’t give a shit enough to ask questions, really think about it or gtfo till they got caught – then she started talking). Even people who’ve smoked pot before realize you have to buy it first.
She testified against her “friend”, which was the thing to do but she completely threw her under the bus, and she basically got off with a slap on the wrist by comparison. I think one year or something like that. While her “best friend”, got all the time, like 10 years, and she was made out on the show to have lead her astray.
It’s amazing how much you can get away with when you’re not “other”.
“You’ll have a national cartoonist’s strike on your hands!”
Ah yes, the typical “It wasn’t something I enjoyed so obviously no one could possibly be encountering joy from this”, a subset of “I have not experienced this discrimination firsthand so therefore you have not experienced it”
I find this horribly common in the software world. If anyone asks why I’m getting out, it’s because there are too many “smart” guys who think exactly like this.
As a guy in the software industry, I apologize wholeheartedly for the insufferable among us.
Yeah, that’s just how society programmed them, and if they were able to see what was wrong with their programming, they’d be in QA instead.
*rimshot, coupled with fleeing from everyone he just offended*
Meh, while yes, Walky is being a jerk, Carla’s argument is no better. “You don’t like it cause you didn’t get it.” arguments are a pain in the ass.
It really is just a dumb nerd war with no real winners.
More like an “it being cancelled isn’t proof it’s bad, you never watched it and it was cancelled due to executive meddling.” It’s a reference to a LOT of shows that get dissed for being screwed by the network. =p
Her first comment is to call the show Walky liked baby and that they killed it off because it was “too smart”.
They are both being pop culture elitists.
Iiiiii dunno. She seems to have a particular read in mind that actually is something networks do generally frown on, rather than focusing on somewhat less cared about measures of ‘smart’. She shouldn’t have insulted Walky, but in fairness, she *may* only deploying this after Wally has impugned something she really does stake a lot on. Whether that’s why or not, she does still make elitism a little worse, though.
I’m certain that Carla is beating back on Walky only because he insulted her beloved thing first. There has been some Dexter merchandise in this dorm that Carla has probably seen, but she has not criticized anyone for it. (I’m thinking of the purple wristbands that Mary and some others wear.)
She is still doing the exact same thing he is: “The thing you like sucks because it wasn’t what I liked.”
The fact that Walky did it first does not absolve her of descending into a dumb mudslinging argument.
Power imbalance aside, “you’ve been discourteous, so I shall be discourteous in return” is generally not the same thing as “I SHALL BE RUDE RANDOMLY.”
There’s slightly more nuance there that you’re wilfully ignoring, broseph.
She isn’t even doing the same thing; she’s only insulted the show, while Walky led off by calling her a loser for her tastes in entertainment.
:(( i’m sorry you’re getting out of the field but i hope you’re doing what you need for your own health
Ah privilege.
Seriously, though, there are so many that stumble so badly and react so negatively to realizing that just because media treats them as the default human does not actually mean they are the only people who exist and the only audience whose tastes matter and so things might not actually be for them and that’s okay and not taking anything away from them.*
* See dudebro whines about anything geek related with female protagonists or that isn’t about grimdark brooding characters or involves gameplay that isn’t about shooting things with guns, white people reacting to Beyonce, straight people angrily wondering why queer issues are in the news this month or trying to wrap their heads around Steven Universe, and so on…
Also see that weird subset of DoA fans that come out during the queer arcs to complain about how things “suck”, are “unrealistic”, and are super alien to their experiences and how this must be bad and thus they can’t wait for (insert straight drama arc here).
Or the ones dismissing Carla’s interest in a show, when they never accused Walky of that when he was getting everyone to watch Dexter and Monkey Master.
I’m sorry, I gotta say it:
Dammit, it didn’t post. Whatever, ruins the joke, but NERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRDS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8cZUhiP3us
Quick, Dorothy, if you leave now, you can avoid hearing them argue over the psychological significance of the characters’ color palates!
*palettes
#sorry #notsorry
I mean, unless they’re some kind of chromovores, but Ultra-Car was cancelled before that script was used, and when D&MM recycled the concept in Season Six it was pretty unrecognizable.
what you don’t eat colors
i subsist on a diet of pure crayola yellows and oranges for breakfast every day
Eh, the purple ones are okay, but the blue ones are too tart.
this is why you add sugar to EVERYTHING
You two need to eat your greens.
for dinner i add spinach
*pilates
Oh look, it’s the comment section.
WHERE? Get it away!
Don’t move, it’s on your face.
Damn, where’s the repellent?!
oh noooooooooo
so both these cartoons were created by in-universe david willis right? has he ever considered rebooting them with the characters in a college environment? I’m sure thatd be something we could all enjoy
He won’t get around to that until he’s finished with the spin-off series “Shipped in Lower Numbers Than the Rest of its Release Wave!”
dammit i was hoping for that coffee shop au
The guy who makes the coffee shop series already has that one sci-fi side project to keep himself busy.
[Begin slow clap]
He considered it, but the higher ups forced him to make it adapted to High School instead.
Gee, Willis, you’re telegraphing a perspective change just as drama starts to heighten. That’s… unconventional.
Also…. HUZZAH! I figured out how to get a gravatar that isn’t that harpy-witch Mary (election campaign ads to the contrary) and I did it WITHOUT registering!
…. because, you know. Stubborn.
…. and lazy.
…. mostly lazy.
…. Really, the old algorithm that assigned me Walky was dead-on.
I was wondering about that! I’m kinda relieved, now I can stop instinctively reading everything you write against a faint background of apprehension.
……..
……
… and now I want to change back.
hahahhahahaha nice
ur hard work to avoid doing a thing has been noted and is appreciated
Probably just a typo in your email *scnr*
Email addresses aren’t case sensitive, but the random avatar algorithm is.
Exactly! Enter in the same email address with a different capitalization and you get a different grav.
Oooh o-o
Testing. Please do not mind this.
Continued testin
getting there
Okay miss violent with daddy issues is a small step back
I could deal with that but let’s keep going
Another try
Aaah no no no no no
Geez why did THAT face of Mary had to be the avatar out of all things
And that was appropriate
So was this
But aah why do I have to go through so much for Joyce; – ;
I just wish to be twins
No longer appropriate
Aaah Dina, Cute<3 I will save this one for an emergency
…oh if this one turned out to be Becky wouldn't it be amazing
Oh well it wasn’t to be
next try
Oh good God no
I’m freeballing at this point
I’m not comfortable how strangely okay I am with Ruth
Who is this guy, anyway? Is he Ethan with anorexia?
I don’t know why I said that, I’m sorry
Why am I almost okay with this
Okay good feeling about this
I am so getting banned for spamming
Or not
Please spare me Mr. Comic Drawer sir I like you
That pic didn’t lend at all the credibility I hoped it would have
If this one doesn’t work I’ll just stop for now and try another day
I haven’t bothered yet. I seem to filter between Amazi-Girl and Roz. No idea why.
Is it weird that this is causing me to ship Walky and Carla after he and Dorothy inevitably break up?
No but Carla’s gay so…
That’s never stopped shippers before.
Nothing stops shippers.
Nothing.
isn’t carla ace?
She’s both!
Homoromantic asexual.
As if a silly little thing like facts will stop the shippers. *shakes head* Foolish Cerberus.
Heh.
Very true. Sexuality, gender, familial relation to one another, pfft, ships gotta sail*.
*Though I sometimes get a little bristly when shippers het-ship canon queer characters because it’s like, really? There weren’t enough straight characters for you to work with that you have to dequeer one of the few characters we get?
I dunno, I imagine it’s just unfortunate connotation elements from my own history with reparative therapy.
Yeah, I totes get that. I felt that a lot about the way people were wanting to throw Danny at Ethan while he was still with Amber, just because I’m so used to the “bi dudes don’t count if they’re with women!” narrative from in and out of queer spaces.
Something I’ve had to come to understand is that it mostly really is just “wouldn’t they be cute together!” rather than any kind of statement on how the character “should” be or some kind of erasure of their identity. I still think it’s perfectly valid to feel that uneasiness, though, ’cause we wouldn’t be thinking it if it wasn’t coming from terrible experience, so I do think it’s perfectly valid to be weirded out at the idea that what this homorantic ace trans lady really needs is to bang a dude.
De-queering people is absolutely different from ignoring straightness, yes. Like, it’s okay to just be uneasy and all too! I’m not sayign ti has to bother you. But it is different, and if it does, that’s also very okay.
Well, often straight characters get turned gay/bi by shippers, so I’ve come to understand shippers see two characters that have a dynamic they like, think they’d work well as a couple, and they start shipping, disregarding what canon says about them.
I honestly mostly shrug at the shipping community: if I ever shipped a couple, it was the canon one. My favorite character is, 90% of the time, the main character. I consume media in a very passive way, so I probably ain’t the best authority on the behaviors of fandom.
Yeah, but shipping canon straight characters who have subtext as queer has a long standing tradition owing to how queer fans for the longest time only ever got subtext.
I dunno, it feels a bit different for reasons, similar to when a canon POC character is whitewashed in adaptations to make them white being different than when a character who was canon white is played by a POC.
Cerberus: You have a point, and I understand the reasoning (for example, I am fine with Roland being played by a black actor in the coming Dark Tower movie, but I’d be turned off by, Iunno, Black Panther being played by a white dude. It would be weird).
I guess I simply care too little about shipping to have any reaction to it that isn’t the occasional “that is some fucked up ship”.
Cerebus: I’m a little more conflicted on this. I get the traditional lack of queer representation. On the other hand, I’m not at all sure that shipping culture has ever relied on actual subtext or that much of it is actually driven by queer fans. Often the subtext seems to be “were on screen together” and even that isn’t strictly necessary.
As I understand it, shippers are more likely female and even if the ratio skews queer, still mostly straight. In DoA, Amber’s our canon example – slash writer even. Is she writing Steve/Tony because she doesn’t feel represented or because of hidden queer subtext? Or is it because she thinks male on male is hot?
Is that really different from a straight guy wanting two female characters to be lesbian for each other because he thinks it’s hot? Which should be fine because it’s turning straight characters gay, not queer ones straight, right?
I’ll admit it does seem different to me. But I think we’re dealing with pretty subtle differences here.
Honestly, I don’t like shipping that ignores anything major about the characters – sexual orientation or hooking up characters who really despise each other in canon or whatever.
Cerberus (and everyone on here, of course), I so appreciate your point of view on issues like this… I don’t have very many friends that talk about these issues (everyone’s on a “no negativity” kick where they get annoyed about “over” posting on issues right now ugh) and so it’s hard to check my own thoughts and privilege sometimes. I love this comment section. /sappiness
Has Carla been established as homoromantic? In SP she was definitely Malayaromantic, but, as Dina would observe, that’s just one data point.
“Girls are totally cute, and I should know because I am one.”
She stated in that universe that she was homoromantic. Word of Willis has confirmed she’s still homoromantic in this universe. And she’s obliquely referenced her homoromantic side in the quote Regalli highlights.
The only way it could be more canon would be if she spelt it out with those experimental lasers she borrowed for her prank against Mary.
A couple of days ago I was reminded of the “Diversity Closet” comic in another context. I don’t know how I could have forgotten Carla’s statement therein. I stand both re-reminded and memory-challenged.
carla MY DARLING
Some people are too similar to work out as a couple.
As a gender studies major currently at IU focusing on gender and sexuality in cartoons this is literally my day. Not even joking a little.
That sounds fascinating.
I’m not being sarcastic.
Seconded. Oh my gosh.
Thirded! I love analyzing that kind of stuff to death! (I am so lucky to have partners that put up with my tendency to analyze literally every piece of media to death)
I wouldn’t know anything about that.
-pushes Undertale behind a conveniently shaped lap-
Welp, time for a Nerd Off. Two Nerds enter. One Nerd leaves.
Three nerds enter. One nerd leaves to go do homework and also to be anywhere else. The other two stay there unto the heat death of the universe.
I feel Dorothy is about 30 seconds away from pulling up an essay on her phone to work on it.
Most certainly.
But will the essay be about microeconomical policy change in recent decades or gender expression in cartoons?
Well, theoretically Leslie’s gender studies class will eventually assign an essay of some kind to serve as an assessment.
Both. Dorothy’s fully capable of finding the overlap.
“Tax cuts for shows with at least two non-normative characters not portrayed in a negative manner will yield long-term increased efficeincies in government (by reducing hate-based crime), the economy (by reducing workforce discrimination), and in internet usage (by eliminating something like 20% of the flame wars out there and at least making the rest stop using the word “gay” in a derogatory manner).”
A+
the immovable fool meets the unstoppable ace
*slow clap*
Yes, yes, Dorotohy. Let’s pretend you don’t have strong opinions on this topic.
As a fan of both, it wasn’t Carla she had in mind when reminding him that he’d get murdered if he kept talking shit.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that Dorothy would back the Giant Mutant Frosted Honey Bun if it came down to a battle royale.
though that could be my It’s-Walky-repost-binge I just went through saying that.
I sorta empathize with Walky here. I’m never sure what to do when I agree with the themes or message of a show or movie, but it’s just… not very good. I always feel bad, and find myself wishing that ethics, good politics, and writing skills always came together.
The show was good! It was fine! The advertisers just didn’t like it cause it couldn’t sell toys!
I see Ultra Car was basically Young Justice.
I suspect it was a little more like Duck Dodgers..
So that makes D&MM Teen Titans Go!?
If by that you mean an only occasionally funny, immature, insult to a beloved and groundbreaking cartoon that only survives because it’s lack of continuity makes it easier to air and is created by people who have admitted to never actually watched the original, then no.
Hell, the developers themselves came to hate Teen Titans Go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AsomkWscrA
I assumed this went to an interview. This is absolutely not the developers hating themselves. This is them planting the criticisms of their show, in the mouth of an odious dweeb who’s an out-and-out villain. If you’re reading this as ‘the developer hates themselves’, you’re missing the really obvious subtext XD
I actually respect the show less for this episode, in much the same way as that guy who killed Ebert or Siskel during Godzilla is less worthy of respect.
(It’s also an unfortunate black mark on ‘Control Freak episodes are always amazing’)
Me, too. You can disagree with criticisms without making fun of them.
If you’re gonna put them in, address those criticisms. That’s something, say, South Park was good at. (It isn’t really all that criticized anymore.)
I’m not sure they do. There’s been like half a dozen episodes doing similar things as that one (like saying the show should be more serious, or try to change to appease critics), and that wasn’t the first of them; they had one with the Young Justice team calling them out as not serious
It usually comes off more as the show runners dismissing the critiques if anything.
It’s pretty funny. Whether they watched ‘the original’ (adaptation of a comic book series) or not isn’t relevant unless the only valid existence of something is the original (…adaptation of a comic book series). They made a pretty hilarious cartoon out of the characters. It’s only an ‘insult’ if you can’t stand anything less than glowing praise sung from on high.
Also, it’s pretty funny that your criticisms very nearly mirror those of the comic book fans during the broadcast’s original run. “THE NEW THING IS BAD, THE OLD THING IS SO MUCH BETTER IN EVERY WAY”, iteration #idek. I had the misfortune of having one in my shared spaces during the original run. STill, I ignored him, and that too worked out well for me
Willis actually mentioned this when TTG! is new, though.
http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=1860
Funny as hell then, funny as hell now
*shakes old man cane at the comments* Back in my day cartoons were better! *falls over and breaks hip* Cartoons…..were….better……
The best Transformers cartoon is Beast Wars, and those guys didn’t watch the original series either. “They didn’t watch the original series” is so far off my list of reasons why things are good.
I’ll second that. Beast Wars was amazing, gotta love the dark hole of serious it descended as it progress.
Then there’s Beast Machines. At least that gave us Obsidian and Strika.
Good to know I’ve seen the best, then.
Given that the original work had a plotline where they had a 50-60ish old man fuck an underaged teenager as a means of showing how the underaged teenager was “evil” and “manipulating”, I’m grateful to both shows in pushing away from the original work and slavish fidelity to its spirit. And I say this as a genuine fan of the original work (seriously, what the hell original Terra arc, what the everloving hell).
Initial reaction: “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!?”
Secondary Reaction: “What the hell am I thinking it’s comics. And not that far off normal Merika.”
Tertiary REaction: “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!? God dammit.”
Yeah, the original Terra arc was all sorts of fucked up in the comics and it being the 1980s isn’t really enough of an excuse. I absolutely love Marv Wolfman and George Perez and that whole run, but that whole bit was just an ugly mess of what the fuckery.
YUP. Rest in peace, Young Justice. Because somehow action figures are different from dolls, and apparently girls don’t buy toys.
“Gotta maintain that illusion of separation, or else boys might stop buying action figures!”
-Executives, most likely
Except Ultra Car wasn’t a mediocre cartoon based on a truly terrible comic.
I respect your right to have a differing opinion.
Even if I did just have to get up from the computer and pace around the room for a bit, flailing my arms in enraged frustration at said differing opinion.
What in the name of the Vishanti did you find mediocre about the Young Justice cartoon?
Just…everything. I mean, it wasn’t bad, by any stretch, but everything about it simply failed to engage me on more than a significant level…although I liked lot of the choices – Using Miss Martian (one of a handful of characters who haven’t returned in some form since the relaunch that I miss), the creation of an original Aqualad (and his connection to Cal Durham), etc – it didn’t entirely gel. An enjoyable way to spend a half hour at a time, but not a patch on the DCAU, or Teen Titans.
That got mangled as I struggled with phrasing…scratch the ‘more’.
I didn’t click with it either.
But then again, that might have something to do with my general apathy towards DC Comics.
The the CW Arrowverse is wearing away >.>
Back when I was a kid, even the lousy stuff got multiple seasons. For a kidvid show to get cancelled, it had to be blatantly atrocious. Or a politico died at an opportune time and the whole Saturday block got pre-empted to cover his funeral. I’m looking at you, Hubert H Humphrey!
Oh, man– my Saturday morning cartoons got preempted for a similar reason when I was little. Nobody actually died, but Nancy Reagan got treated for her breast cancer. I missed a new episode of the Flintstone Kids so they could talk about old lady breasts at me.
Oh, well– at least they didn’t preempt Mighty Mouse.
There were a few when I was growing up that were trashed by the studios because they didn’t fit an easy formula that they felt they could market or had a prominent girl character that defied traditional boy-focused marketing or so on. But then, I might have grown up a little after you.
its good to see some human interaction in these strips that i am more experienced with
I still don’t understand why Dorothy, with everything she has going for her, is with Walky
I think it’s the fun times.
I’m sure she could find a guy to have fun times with that doesn’t like a 12 year old
act like a 12 year old…
She likes that part though. It’s less stress and allows her to try to believe that this relationship is just for fun and isn’t under pressure to be something its not.
Hormones, sculpted caramel, and someone she can relax and be unprofessional around.
She also likes that he believes in her, and isn’t crushingly codependent. She thinks he’s funny and clever, and fun to kiss, and he chills with her when she has a rough day. He’s her refuge from her self-enforced mission to constantly achieve success.
(I mean, I wouldn’t date Walky either, but Dorothy really digs him.)
1. She has to do everything for him, which is a strong contrast to Danny, who I imagine was eager to do everything for her.
2. He doesn’t look at her crazy or make qualified remarks regarding her ambition to become president.
… And that’s all I got
idk i can think of about seven reasons
1. it’s fun
2. she’s going for a career in politics which will, decidedly, overall not be Fun
3. he’s not going for a career in politics which means that the odds of this coming back to bite her later are small
4. walky is pretty smart when he puts his mind down to it
5. it’s fun
6. she wants to
7. sex, i’m assuming
Pretty much.
Plus:
8) He’s really really hot.
9) He respects and doesn’t whine about there being a set end-point for their relationship.
10) He’s into the same dumb cartoon thing she is and is fun to hang out with when she needs to shut off her brain.
11) He’s chill, which is a nice change of pace from her usual hectic schedule, and isn’t intimidated by her having big aspirations or being smart (which is sadly rare enough to be notable among straight men).
12) He believes in her dreams and thinks they are awesome.
13) Did I mention, he’s described as surprisingly hot?
Caramel. Abs.
all of these!!
ooh a 14) dorothy likes taking care of people, and walky is just self-sufficient enough to deal with most of his problems while also needing extra support occasionally. enough to make her feel needed without making her feel like she’s doing all the emotional labor.
Some people like having what is referred to as a dumb job – a job that keeps you busy, but lets your mind rest.
Walky is Dorothy’s dumb boyfriend. He’s her escape from the academic and political slaughterhouse she’s ever forcing herself to go through.
I wonder what fandom Dorothy has that she’d freak out about if it were criticised.
Dorothy doesn’t strike me as the type to take her pop culture that seriously. Considering how much effort she puts into her academics she’d burn out pretty quick if she took her cartoons as seriously and they’re meant to be an escape for her. Or she has the same problem I do where it’s impossible for me ti turn my brain off ever and not take all the media I consume seriously.
Yeah, Dorothy takes her career aspirations seriously and that’s about it. She seems like the type of fan who acknowledges all the stupid in her favorite shows and loves them despite that because it lets her shut off her brain for a bit.
Man, I have had this same argument, except about “Young Justice” or “ATLA and LoK” so many times. Mainly when other people start hating on them (although with the second two, four times out of five the people hating on ATLA only say Shyamalan’s movie, and the other time it’s because they don’t like the fact Nick had show with a same-sex couple). God but the riches I would have if I had but a nickel for every time I had this argument.
Co-sign.
I find that noting which people can’t stand Korrasami is a quick way to establish whose opinions need a few more grains of salt than my default.
I was never a big fan of Korrasami but it has the benefit of being better than just about every other pairing on the show. Then again, Walky more or less is Bolin isn’t he?
Wait there are people that argue that ATLA and LoK are dumb shows?
… These are the kind of people who’d see a VHS for Watership Down and go “Oh, a cartoon about bunnies! Perfect for the 2nd graders!” aren’t they.
Ironically enough, yes, several of these people were. Anyone who argued against ATLA and LoK would invariably make up the majority of people I met who argued against YJ.
Well, Rukduk did indicate it’s rare to say about ATLA the cartoon. It’s pretty true of ATLA the movie.
But yes, it’s REALLY common to rant about LoK.
Heh. That’s actually funny.
The ones that assume hentai DVDs are nice cartoons for the kids alarm me, though. Where did they even get those, a garage sale?
Right off store racks, sometimes. I recall reading one dude talk about how he warned a parent, like, thrice, that Ninja Scroll wasn’t for kids, and they rented it over his protestations because it’s a cartoon, then came back angry because it wasn’t good for his daughters.
That actually happened to me, my dad knew I liked anime so on a blockbuster run he got me a “ranma 1/2” tape, which is fine, and “kite”, which is a fairly graphic movie about an underage female assassin who iirc occasionally used sex to get close to her targets (mind you it’s been like twenty years since I watched it so my memory might be shaky on the details)…
But like… Dad meant well….
… when was the last time >anyone< saw a VHS?
People seem to be collecting them like records now.
Last time I looked in my closet.
So many boxes, so many movies. Even now, I have yet to replace most of my library.
(and the way things are leaning towards a no-physical-media, all-streaming model now, I may never.)
I still have some. People my age (born in the early 90s) were around when VHS was still used. It’s hilarious because so many older people assume we always had the internet. We did, but definitely not as it is now. When i was young, the internet was still AOL.com, we wrote essays in school by hand pretty much until college, and we mainly used the computer for things like Oregon trail.
I…still use mine. To record and play back cable TV programs. I will neither confirm nor deny the rumor that I knew Tom Bombadil when he was a young man.
This weekend.
… when I was visiting my parents for the 4th.
Did you have to set the clock for them????
Of course not.
They are perfectly well aware that the VCR clock is meaningless, and have a perfectly functional pendulum-operated clock hanging from the wall to the right of the TV.
(Also, my dad’s an old-school tech-geek who knows what all the buttons on all the boxes and remotes do and keeps the manuals just in case and knows exactly how to read them. They’ve also got dvd and blue ray. They just don’t get rid of their old stuff.)
There’s plenty of reasons other than Korrasami — which isn’t actually a reason, in my book, but anyway — to be down on LoK. I liked it, but it was really hurt for only being picked up for one season at first, which forced a rushed resolution to the first season which in turn left them short of ideas for the second one — which was a muddled mess.
Also, the writers had the damnedest pattern of not letting Korra win fights on her own, which made me sad.
While Book 3 and 4 of LOK were definitely an improvement Books 1 and 2 did sour a lot of people- mainly due to crummy dialogue, unlikeable romantic relationships and rushed/forced resolutions. Book 1 had great potential but ultimately fell flat in the end and Book 2 had the worst villain of the franchise. Also Book 2 for some folks shit on Aang and Katara in some respects (like I can get Aang struggling as a dad quite well, but Katara not getting him in line is ridiculous to me and always will be). Book 2 is enough for some people to hate the show tbh because it sometimes ruins enjoyment of the previous franchise in some respects.
Books 3 and 4 were definitely better even if they weren’t perfect though. It even in some ways made the first Book a little better knowing that makorra wouldn’t get back together at all. Not enough to save it has ultimately the worst book of both shows but still.
ATLA is definitely better in terms of writing than LOK, but LOK isn’t overall, a bad show. It’s mainly because ATLA had a solid vision from beginning to end. The creators also had a lot of help in terms of the cultures and characters from the beginning in ATLA. LOK did not.
*2nd book a little better
Your last paragraph is what I was trying to put into words! I was watching LOK and I was like, “where are they going with this?” story and character wise.
The problem is that because it was supposed to be a miniseries it HAD to have a resolution by the end of the season, which is a shame cause otherwise they could have used an entire season trying to give Korra and everyone else their powers back instead of the awful second season we got, still to this day the worst to come out of that season is the atrocious animation, first season was AMAZING (how can it not be when you’re working with the same people that did the Boondocks?) but the second season was so bad I almost quit the show after the first two episodes.
Argh, I finally figured out you are talking about Avatar and Korra. Now I can reread the comments and they will make sense.
Okay, something needs to be cleared up here:
Book 1 of LoK was the best one. Not just the best of LoK — the best of the entire Avatar franchise. It did not fall flat in the end. It was perfect in every possible way. Lumping it together with the horrible trainweck that was Book 2 is an insult to it.
So that everyone may be able to have subjective opinions that are objectively correct, I shall now rank the four seasons of LoK and compare them to AtLA.
From best to worst:
1. LoK Book 1: 11/10
2. AtLA (all books taken together): 10/10
3. LoK Book 4: 9/10
4. LoK Book 3: 8/10
5. [quarantine distance]
6. [quarantine distance]
7. [quarantine distance]
8. LoK Book 2: Because it introduced Varrick, and because the First Avatar segments were actually really good, it gets bumped up to 1/10. But if anyone wants to give it, like, -∞/10, I’m not going to argue.
Note: I have not seen the Shyamalan movie, nor do I intend to.
A wise decision on Shyamalan’s movie. Guy whitewashed the cast so bad he might as well have been using snowmen, the effects were iffy, the acting horrid except for Zuko, Iroh, and Zhao, and he skipped over the mechanist, the Kiyoshi Warriors, and Jet while simultaneously cutting the balls off of the Blue Spirit. And that’s just some of the reasons to not watch it. I honestly cannot express the sheer amount of vitriol I have for that movie.
Yep. I had a lot of issues with it, among other things the pacing was all messed up, the lack of character development for quite a few folks, where they went with the concept of the Avatar State. I agree with you in that it just seemed rushed and not well though out as a result. As for Korra herself, I don’t know, she seemed developed and not developed at the same time? Like how she and most of the characters seemed to be defined by their relationship to the previous series’ characters, the entire show seemed that way as well, and it wasn’t enough for me to really enjoy it.
I’m also in the camp that pretends the ATLA tie in comics aren’t cannon. But I do think I’m biased in that way, because it’d be really hard to surpass as a great a show as ATLA was. Korrasami was bold and brave and wonderful, but it didn’t make the show.
yeah imo the only season of korra really worth watching is 3. i mean, 4 was definitely better than 1 and 2, but it was lacking something with regards to kuvira and the resolution of the major conflict. otoh, of course, there’s the last few minutes. and some of season 2 is worth watching just for varrick.
I’m surprised by these claims that season 3 was better than seasons 1 and 2… I’m watching the series for the first time now, and while the first two seasons had some serious pacing issues, a quarter of the way through the third, all I’ve seen is absolutely everybody clinging to the idiot ball like it’s their darling child.
Most especially Korra and Tenzin in the second episode…granted, she’s rather averse to thinking things through, and he’s blinkered once he gets his mind set on something (ironically for an Air Bender), but I can’t even begin to comprehend how even they thought ‘hello, Mr Middle Aged Earth Kingdom Guy, now that you can Air Bend, you have to come with us, because you have to be an Air Nomad, now’ would go over well.
Yeah. It’s like something like that would have turned into a philosophical discussion in the first series (remember Jet and Zuko when he first joined the Gaang). A huge conflict in the plot was whether or not the four nations could live together in harmony again- a lot of people were suspicious of each other, and mostly for good reason. Especially Tenzin just blindly accepting the dude, it would have been more in character for him to stop and think about it first, or at least investigate or something before making such a rash decision.
LoK characters making dumb decisions is a constant in all three seasons. What sells S3 for me is the Red Lotus, particularly Zaheer; it also has some spectacular scenes towards the end and we get to see Tenzin go beast-mode.
*all four seasons. :v
Yeah, the first season was pretty weak. I’m not really mad at the fact that a lot of the folks who hate it, stopped there (Me and wife marathoned it after the announcement to see if it was remotely justified to treat Korrasami as something added at the last second and without actual support in the prior text).
Ultimately, I did like LoK, but I think it really suffered from not having a single overarching plot for the entire series the way AtLA did. I mean AtLA had a lot of side plots and new threads and some plotlines that were introduced and resolved within one season, but everything was built around the solid core of “defeat the Fire Lord, end the century-long war.”
Korra didn’t have a plotline that lasted the entire series, the goalposts were always shifting with each season. It made the storytelling way clunkier that AtLA’s was. And as delighted as I was to be getting some canon F/F, almost every single romance was horribly written. I only liked P’li/Zaheer and Jinora/Kai as they appeared onscreen – even with Korrasami, I liked the concept way better than the execution.
I don’t dislike LoK, but I feel that in terms of storytelling it’s definitely below that of ATLA. Several dues ex machina reversals, Asami pretty much having no flaws, and characters aren’t quite as compelling.
I mean, they can both be right
It could have been too smart, thus not drawing the views they wanted, and as such they axed it
I’d like to see Dorothy say that, followed by both of them staring at her then throwing their hands up in the air and storming off in general disgust.
This debate is getting ugly.
Are you kidding? One is “a tall goddess”, the other is “sculpted from caramel”
So what you’re saying is someone should throw them an apple labeled “to the fairest”?
I think an apple of discord is redundant, at this point. Mad cool classic ref, though. Props.
Walky wants to give it to Dorothy, Carla wants to deny it to cartoon-boy?
What poor chump would they get to judge which of them deserves that apple. (And why apples such a negative fruit in anncient religion/myths of the eastern Mediterranean?)
It’s not that apples themselves are evil, it’s just that the Latin words for “evil” and “Apple” are remarkably similar and very easy to mistranslate as a result. (If I remember correctly evil is “malus” and apple is “melus”) As a result, apple=evil, even though it would more likely have been a fig in the original oral tradition. So blame medieval scribes.
joe. they’d get joe
Kallisti!
This debate is getting SEXY AS HELL.
Reminds me of when I accidentally instigated a thing with some Modern Family fans. Eh, they’re probably not watching the show anymore.
I love how Carla takes time to correct Dorothy on what kind of situation this is. This is not murder time. This is FLAME WAR IRL!!!!
Not even an extinguisher can put out these kind of flames.
I relate to Dorothy in this one, especially when people start going on about Transformers, Pokemons, or Marvel vs. DC superheroes.
Alakazam is smarter than Batman.
At first I thought you misspelled Shazam.
It’s Pokemans.
The name Pokémon is the romanized contraction of the Japanese brand Pocket Monsters (ポケットモンスター Poketto Monsutā). The term Pokémon, in addition to referring to the Pokémon franchise itself, also collectively refers to the 722 known fictional species that have made appearances in Pokémon media as of the release of the sixth generation titles Pokémon X and Y.
—————————
NOT Pokeman (or Pokemans).
I think Pl0x may have been making a Toedad joke:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/04-walking-with-dina/pokeman/
I am so all about this comic.
Well, Joye and Becky are getting away from a kinda intolerant/uneasy church,
Billie is lazing around after sorta kicking Becky out without telling her.
Danny is dealing with breaking up with his super hero girlfriend.
Amber is trying to hold things together, and might be looking for one of her dildos that disappeared.
Dina is helping smooth things over with the break up.
Joe is sorta texting Joyce to help her deal with issues. Although that was earlier, so… Cereal?
Roz is getting reasy to meet up with her sister.
Mary is… Avoiding thinking about her political idols.
And Ruth is… Oooookaaaay?
I like Joe’s priorities.
Don’t you mean thirsty?
No, cereal sounded good then. Sounds good now too.
What about Daisy?
Oatmeal, maybe?
Frying sausage links, getting distracted by her mental imagery as they dry out and burn in the pan.
Amber is…almost totally suppressed by her alter.
Amazi-girl is…on the verge of exploding in some act of moral outrage hyper-escalated into violent vigilantism.
I think you’re right on that. Amazi-Girl is starting to make unilateral decisions for Amber, removing Danny from her life because of his “betrayal” and fixating on Sal as the cause of every single one of her problems. For all we know, Amber still hasn’t resurfaced after spending all day with Amazi-Girl in the driver’s seat.
According to the tags, we haven’t seen Amber on-screen since April 26. It’s been Amazi-girl since then.
Yep. We’re seeing Amber sometime in two weeks and I’m really anxious to see where that goes. Given that we haven’t seen Amber at all since then, I am really thinking that she’s been Amazi-Girl for the entire length of that day and maybe only came out of it after she did Danny’s laundry.
‘Cause I’m wondering if her recent PTSD episode from seeing Sal ended pushing her dissociation to the point where she and Amazi-Girl stop sharing memories. At least at this point, Amazi-Girl has become distinct enough that she’s not only making decisions for Amber’s benefit, but they’re outright referring to each other as separate entities now, rather than Amber assigning alters to specific actions, ie: “Amazi-Girl is dating Danny” and “Amber’s anger is the problem.”
Yessssssss nerd yelling for nerds I love this
Ah, the music of my people.
Walky’s only argument for Ultra Car being bad seems to just be low ratings. I’m guessing he never saw an episode past the crossover. Then again I think based on his attitude towards things that require any real effort to fully understand he probably wouldn’t have liked it anyway because it wadn’t just joke after joke. From the little we’ve heard about Dexter it seems deeply silly. Carla’s probably right about her show being too smart. Walky’s attitude is once again deeply annoying. Ratings don’t automatically equal quality or lack of.
Let’s give him some credit; he’s fairly clever and decent at banter, so it probably didn’t fly over his head.
Of course, that means he never gave it a chance, which is arguably worse.
The show is about a sarcastic flying car. Which if we’re assuming the case, is actually probably just Ultracar as portrayed in the regular Walkyverse. In short, it’s probably not remotely “smart” but involved lots of pies and humor but probably had her eventually become a human robot girl. In short, something which would appeal deeply to Carla but seems just silly to Walky.
Yeah, it’s a nice character moment and makes a nice little dig about a lot of arguments surrounding niche programming. I’ve seen so many things where someone used demographics or ratings to argue that super problematic thing was somehow “objectively” better than niche thing.
It especially tends to get thrown at queer affirming works or works with female protagonists that are more popular than certain assholes think they should be.
And it’s a nice character moment for Walky because his cluelessness about how much social messages actually guide his behavioral choices (see the shoes arc) is a major aspect of his current struggles (he’s been told all his life that he’s “naturally smart” and has a hard time letting go of that because that’s a major thing he’s built his whole self-image around, not to mention his handling of certain ideas of masculinity).
To him, of course Ultra Car is bad. It had a bad crossover (and crossovers tend to be universally bad and fail to show the best qualities of either show and frequently just leave fans of both shows somewhat neutral about the other) and wasn’t popular, thus it hasn’t been socially rubber-stamped.
The idea that it could nonetheless have important niche appeal to someone not him is foreign to him, because he’s used to being more-or-less the default human and having most works be one’s he can identify with and share with other people who love the show. And that sharing part is a big reason he loves the show so much:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/02-choosing-my-religion/sshh/
Thus Carla’s experience of being alienated in resonant media is very strange and foreign to him as is having to cling to whatever media has that tiny drop of representation whether good or bad (shout out to fellow Xena fans).
^ I was too young for Xena but that’s in a nutshell why I had a huge soft spot for Mercedes Lackey books for a very long time (in a rural conservative area, that was the only representation for queer stuff I had access to that didn’t have rainbow flags printed all over it – and, like, don’t get me wrong, Pride matters but if you’re a teenager in a place with a conservative church:people ratio of greater than 1:25, and the one guy who was out in the entire school got bashed so bad he spent a total of nearly 6 months his first year out in the hospital and then he switched schools because he was afraid someone was going to kill him if he went back again? Yeah. You don’t exactly feel comfy marching or carrying around stuff with that flag painted on. Juuuust sayin’. See also why I feel punchy towards people who out others because there’s “no excuse” not to be out nowadays, and towards people who don’t accept that in some regions, it’s still downright dangerous to come out).
Sympathy so very much there.
Xena…. Beat still my heart. You never truly forget your first fandom.
Joxer the mighty, roams through the countryside…
Ah Xena, I loved that show, miss it dearly. One of the few cases where the spinoff was better than the original.
I feel like Hercules really suffered for having Kevin Sorbo being too homophobic of a Christian to let the gay subtext run as free and wild on that show as it did in Xena. One of many reasons why Lucy Lawless is a better person than him.
Now I’m wondering if Ultra Car identified as a gal in the cartoons.
I mean, Carla is completely correct about her gender identity (Following the basic universe rules) but pursuant to what I see modern fandom inching (slowly) towards doing, I’m wondering if the SHOW said it.
Because I think about the only way I could love Carla more at this point was if she was engaging in actual analysis of a show and trying to draw interpretations regardless of the super, super, SUPER important canon.
Well that or she could get into a song and dance number.
Whatever the answer, I”m sure Carla has thought long and hard about UltraCar’s gender identity.
I dare say this comes pretty close to a song and dance number
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/carla/
That’s already in the calculus, and isn’t a song and dance number. And yeah, I imagine she did! It’s pretty great.
…dammit, I’m going to have to amend that. Ultra-car is just plain /right/ on why Ultra Car got panned (This doesn’t make her correct about DntMM). Kids can sometimes be terrible, but even worse can be marketting, who ‘know’ certain toys won’t sell, because conventional wisdom says they don’t. It’s astoundingly unlikely that the marketers are more progressive in her childhood than they are in the modern era (even if Willis does often make named characters moreso than normal).
I assumed this was a direct related to the infamous Willis. “Toys for Boys” Transformers seminar which was attended almost entirely by women.
…I somehow had not heard the lattermost tidbit ever.
http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=2095
Her line about gender roles make me think a similar twist that happened to many UC fans over in Shortpacked may have happened in the unaired finale.
I suspect that is likely.
In which case, Ultra Car may have been the first cartoon ever to broach that subject and thus holds a very dear place in her heart for even presenting that as a potential thing that can happen.
Like how Steven Universe does that for a lot of non-binary kids.
I feel like I’m missing a lot of good cartoons now. Been like over 5 years since I’ve looked into anything going on. I’m aware of some good ones, like the Avatar sequel Kora, just haven’t actually had the time for it.
I think it probably did, as an ambiguous take on that would likely have been subjected to less studio meddling.
Though whatever the answer, Ultra Car being a girl robot in particular is clearly of great importance to Carla and a major point of her identification with the character.
…of /course/. Now I’m actually glad I asked, rather than having something I reread and realized would comes off as the exact thing I’m criticiizing in other nerds. An actually ambiguous thing. Because that’s all you can get away with on TV. hahaha ahahaha… sigh.
And you know she’s had all of that bullshit thrown at her. She’s probably been gatekept if this is at all popular (even as a niche thing). I mean, really, of COURSE she’s been gatekept, she’s an engineer. But it didn’t just happen in her studies, because of COURSE it didn’t.
I mean, not everyone is… but it seems too fitting for her arc. All the money in the world, and it didn’t stop a darn thing.
I think about that aspect a lot.
Largely because most of the media is happy to pretend that Caitlyn Jenner is the only trans person on the planet. And so it becomes really apparent how her wealth buys he out of a certain level of nonsense, but not a lot of the standard day-to-day transphobias and little digs.
And I think it’s a major aspect of Carla’s character. She’s rich. She has a family who loves her. She’s somewhat spoiled rotten (or rutten, if you will, yes, I will immediately go to Pun Hell, do not collect go, etc…).
But as you note, that does not save her from having the same bullshit a lot of us go through. From being beat up and ostracized as a kid, from having been gatekept out of various things, out of dealing with standard issue sexism fucking with things she loves, out of dealing with casual transphobia and having authority figures do nothing about it, from having to deal with all the other -isms that apply to her.
And that’s sort of an interesting truism about being marginalized. That to the world, it doesn’t matter who your parents are or what you’ve done with your life, you’re just X marginalized identity at the end of the day (I’m thinking specifically of incidents like the Harvard professor who got the standard anti-black police harassment, because the racist cop who hassled him only saw “a black guy” and assumed the standard litany of racist bullshit because of it).
8(
That should be *her* rather than “he”.
Cambridge Police are super assholes.
My insurance company was late ( 2 weeks ) in processing my check, and I was stopped in Cambridge for a bullshit reason. ( why did you switch lanes when I was tailgating you ) . Arrested, towed, impounded. I was tossed in A dungeon for 14 hours without even a drop of water. And I’m white, and the cop was female.
That’s how a respectful whiteperson is treated in Cambridge: police state. When he backtalked the Cambridge Cop I knew it was going full arrest.
Boston Cops are a lot more decent. They are professional. I think there is something about liberal places that attracts fascist police.
After Mary’s homophobia there is something heartwarming about Walky and Carla bickering about a TV-show. Walky does not have a problem with her gender identity – only with her choice in entertainment.
And contrary to most people he acknowledge the value in something that is very important to Carla and that most people would just dismiss as a quirk – UltraCar – so much that he has strong opinions about it. Incredibly stupid opinions that he will be OWNED about, but it is still validating.
who cares about trivia like how you’re plumbed or which bathroom you use? what counts is that you like the wrong things, and are thus the wrong kind of nerd!
EXACTLY!!! SOMEONE IS FANDOMING WRONG!!!
Yup, it’s the sort of low-stakes argument that Carla likely wants to be surrounded by rather than the attempts to undermine her hard-fight gender. It’s where she’s engaged with like a fellow geek rather than being made to defend her very identity.
Does Walky *know* about Carla, though?
Is it his business?
No, but it would very much color the nature of the argument.
If he knows, it’s an “I don’t care that you’re not cis, we’re arguing cartoons like normal people because that’s what’s important” thing. Or maybe a “you only like that show because you’re trans, all the normal people preferred the good show” thing.
If he doesn’t know, it’s just Walky being stupid without a lot of subtext, except the subtext that gets read into it by people who don’t know that he doesn’t know.
I’d guess that he does know. He’s been surprisingly aware of subtle clues in the past.
Doesn’t matter – SHE knows that this is not about her identity but about her favorit show. For me, that’s what her line in panel 1 is about, that she makes sure to keep this a fandom thing.
Also, I give pretty good odds for Walky knowing. He is rather observant in these matters and has never been shown to care much about it (compare his jokes about Ethan, followed much later by the revelation that he knew exactly what it was all about)
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/freshstart/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/exclusivity/
Does he care? I doubt it.
I think he does, as they dorm on the same floor and Mary would not be the type of person to be ‘silent’ while confronting Carla or keeping her thoughts to herself. Walky probably knows about the BS between them and why. Drama spreads faster than the cold in dorms.
I’m going to say probably not. Generally I don’t like to assume that all the characters know the secrets the readers know. From Walky, I’d expect some reaction – probably ugly at first, if only from ignorance.
I mean, I guess it’s possible Joyce is the only one who doesn’t know about Carla, but I’d gotten the impression she passes better than that. Sal figured it out. Ruth knew. Mary figured it out, cause she’s a snoop. That’s pretty much it, as far as I know.
Aww the ” to smart ” debate, which is code for “it was to good for its time” or “it just sucked and people are just using that as an excuse to say that a franchise is misunderstood when nobody else seemed to warm up to it despite their best efforts.”
Kind of like when your teenaged daughter brings home her new douchebag boy friend he’s a dick to everyone he knows and when you point that out she replies with ” You got to give him a chance he’s just misunderstood !” Or some Bullshit like that.
So Walky in Leather Pants?
A nerd arguing “killed because it was too smart” about their fave show?
Now we KNOW Walky’s right that it was rubbish and nobody watched it.
Yeah I’m 100% on Carla’s side. Shows have definitely been cancelled for being more or less “-too smart” for mass appeal. Low ratings don’t really tell you anything about quality. And for all we know the ratings were fine but too many girls were watching it and as far as advertiser’s ate concerned if boys aren”t watching, no one is.
The irony is, of course, the Ultracar we know is the embodiment of low brow 1930s humor.
Yeah, that’s a consistent enough phenomenon that I have no issue in assuming that that was what happened with regards to the Ultra Car cartoon.
Often times being liked by the “wrong demographic” is considered to be the kiss of death for even a popular cartoon. See how much Legend of Korra got dicked around by Nickelodeon because its fanbase was mostly girls or how Static Shock needed a lot of major cartoon luminaries sticking up for it to keep running because it wasn’t “popular enough with white kids and only white kids buy toys”.
Hell, even wildly successful shows like Teen Titans, Avatar the Last Airbender, and The Batman Animated Series got dicked around a little bit simply because the studios couldn’t figure out which age range they appealed to and it didn’t fit their standard model of shows.
And it’s not just cartoons that get that type of meddling. Buffy had the Dawn arc added largely because the network at the time thought that since the characters were in college that they’d no longer be relatable to teens and so needed a new teen character to appeal to the younger demographic. Xena got messed with a bit because its early teasing of the main characters being together made the networks hyper nervous about boycotts. And Firefly’s issues with the network and all the stuff Fox did to doom that show are the stuff of legends.
Aw hell, White People didn’t watch Static Shock? That guy was great. He’s like Spider Man but actually had a good cartoon.
static shock was a amazing cartoon and i was surprised when it didnt get picked up for a sixth season.
I’m white and Static Shock is one of my favorite cartoons of all time. It was so good on so many levels, and wasn’t afraid to tackle serious issues like racism, gun violence, the effects of bullying, and the struggle of people to reform and escape their past.
I’m also white and loved it. I prefer it to the other DCAU shows, really. I later found out he wasn’t entirely a new character, but it sure felt like he was, and that breathed a ton of life into it.
And having school-related problems was something I related to. It’s why I also like Danny Phantom and American Dragon much later on.
Heck, Static wasn’t even really a DC character at the time. He was from an imprint called Milestone that was spearheaded by the late great Dwayne McDuffie, and IIRC it was published under DC, which is why Milestone characters like Icon and Rocket ended up appearing in Young Justice. Static’s show wasn’t originally set in the DCAU but was folded into it, and for the better, I think.
DC’s complete inability to sell Static to readers (his latest ongoing only ran for 8 issues, they still haven’t collected the original series, and they consistently refuse to just put him in the Teen Titans already) is pretty much one of the most emblematic examples of comics boxing out black characters. Dude had his own cartoon for four years, but nah, can’t run his own ongoing. Let’s give Aquaman another shot instead.
I don’t really read DC or Marvel that much, but the fact that Static is getting screwed by DC is not surprising. Infuriating to no end, because he’s such a cool character and hero with a pretty unique set of powers that are really only limited by his own creativity, but not surprising. Also, another reason I’m still upset by the cancellation of Young Justice is that at the end of Season 2 he was being set up to a member of the team for the next season. That would have been amazing!!!
Oh yeah, Static’s the bomb, and his constant shelving is super irritating. He’s Spider-Man with Magneto by way of Black Lightning powers; that’s fucking rad.
… and consider also that if the cartoon was too androgynous for the Hanks and Carols of the world to be comfy with it, ratings could tank just because parents don’t feel it’s “appropriate” for their little darlings.
See also: I was suuuuper pressured to not watch shit like X-Men and Batman and Spiderman when I was a kid, and to watch shit like Barbie and Friends or Sailor Moon or whatever. Because “appropriate”. And “people will think you’re a boy if you watch too much stuff like that – you don’t want to be thought of as a gross boy, do you?” (yeah given my mental revelations these past few months, those sorts of comments are becoming pretty funny in retrospect. And I don’t mean it sarcastically. Though it does make me wonder if she had a suspicion and was trying to stomp it out in me.)
Got to the point that I’d catch the oh-god-early showing at 4AM so I could watch them without my mother making fun of both me and the show every five minutes.
Yeah, I was a kid who’d get up at 4AM to take in my favorite cartoons – particularly X-Men:Evolution which most people thought was godawful yet I really liked a lot mainly because (in retrospect) they really laid on the queer metaphors (Beast and Spyke both hating their bodies and feeling like horrible monsters – like fuck how the hell is that not a metaphor for being trans and going through the wrong puberty?! – Storm, well, being Storm, Rogue feeling/being untouchable, could go on) and dealt a lot with the interpersonal stuff and the politics of becoming an activist. Case in point: there’s one story arc where Spyke gives up the X-Men and goes to live with the Morlocks because not everyone is a socially-acceptable mutant and it boils down to Xavier’s group isn’t helping those who can’t fit neatly into Society’s old mold – and if that wasn’t a metaphor for the divide between the “good queers” who model traditional gender roles and don’t rock society’s boat too much and the “bad queers” who either won’t or can’t perform gender in a traditional way and who refuse to take bullshit lying down and are loud and outspoken about their activism, I don’t know what the fuck was. And, like, I could go on but it was a lot of heavy shit for a kids’ cartoon and it didn’t talk down to you like a lot of shows would or overly-simplify it. And the really awesome thing was that they didn’t present him as this awful guy but rather as someone who wasn’t being helped by the X-Men the way they said they were going to help and he got fed up with waiting for them to do something and decided to go and help people himself on his own.
(seriously, might be Nostalgia Goggles but my memory of that show is that it was fucking awesome on the political metaphor storytelling and was almost certainly cancelled because it laid on those metaphors a bit too blatantly for social conservatives)
(X-Men: Evolution might be to me what Ultracar is to Carla – it is something I have a huge soft spot for despite social backlash about it being a bad show or whatever and I will fight you over whether or not it’s good. :P)
*adds X-Men: Evolution to list of shows I need to watch*
I don’t think you will be disappointed. A lot of the show is based around the struggle of identity and how one can be a part of society while being true to themselves.
It’s unfairly maligned for not being X-Men TAS. I like it pretty much because it isn’t the Wolverine Show guess starring the X-Men, to the point where Wolverine is basically just a recurring extra who only gets two focus episodes and comes off as a lovable, gruff uncle. There’s huge focus on characterization and a lot of the episodes really only have one token fight wrapped around twenty minutes of long conversations. Also it makes Cyclops and Jean Grey cool and gave them a believable romance, and typing that made me die a little.
It’s a lot more interested in the idea of “mutants as a metaphor” than any of the other shows (and ischemgeek is dead on about its handling of the Morlocks, turning them from standard fare Weird Freaks to a cast off group of social misfits who don’t have the privilege of looking hot and living in a mansion), and does the low sci-fi thing the X-Men films have been banging on about for 16 years leaps and bounds better.
Also it’s super white, which is always a negative for me but even moreso when it’s done with the X-Men, but there genuinely is a lot to love about it once it gets passed the trope-filled first season.
i weirdly like wolverine and the xmen. for an xmen show specifically about wolverine it had a lot of high-stakes drama and an intriguing conceit. and while wolverine was annoyingly Always Right, the characters around him were allowed to be nuanced in ways that they aren’t always. like Scott!! Scott was allowed to be broken and i love it. and Emma broke my heart. and Rogue was so cool. i’m not gonna lie Rogue is my number one priority in most Xmen content
Oh yeah, far as I’m concerned, Rogue is straight up Top 2 most important X-characters, right along Nightcrawler, ’cause the two of them really embody a lot of the central themes of the entire franchise, and it’s sad to see Rogue in the comics nowadays is just a big mopey Avengers jerk.
Haven’t watched WatXM yet, but I’ll take your word on Rogue being great. She was one of the highlights of XTAS, and the snarky goth Rogue from Evo was likewise good. Gambit forever remains a scumbag I still nevertheless have a deep unironic love for, though.
i really wish that there was more material with Rogue and Nightcrawler as siblings, that’s kind of my heart’s desire right there. it’s just. they’re so great and they could be even greater as a TEAM. especially considering all the family they have to deal with.
Rogue is a lot of fun. Gambit…i like him as a classic scruffy romantic hero, hahahaa. he gets his Humphrey Bogart shtick on and that’s good stuff.
…i’m sorry to hear that Rogue is being an Avengers jerk nowadays. i was happy for her that she got control over her skin. some of the decisions coming from her seemed pretty weird tho
Rogue’s back to “I cain’t tuch yuh” and the Brick of the team. On one hand I like Rogue more when she was a defined powerset (and this is something X-media tends to lack except for XTAS where it was straight up lifted from the comics), but it’s been 30 years. It’s fine for Rogue to have nice things now.
Rogue being in the Avengers is even more hilarious because now in the comics the entire Mutant race is going extinct (again) but she still just wants to keep her job.
Gambit, though, it’s weird to me how hard it is for writers to get him. He’s a charming, handsome scoundrel and a thief. I don’t get why people keep making him Scumbag McAngst.
Also he’s one of those planned to be bi but never materialized characters like Wolverine, so that’s a plus in my book.
ugggh really? what is the point of letting her touch and then taking it away. why. no. and then, like, her not supporting mutants?? rogue your evil terrorist mom is side-eying you so hard and irene is gonna haunt you from beyond the grave unless she’s alive again in which case she will probably leave you a bunch of nasty phone messages SERIOUSLY
-shruuuuuuug- because you gotta keep the tension up and how can you possibly keep the tension up unless you keep everything in a stasis of “can you or can’t you trust him” like letting characters grow and develop. what. what is that
bi!gambit. yes. a good.
…hahahaha oh man most of my rogue comics knowledge comes from those months i went on an xmen fanfiction binge for rogue/remy fic i haven’t. i havent really touched any rogue comics not even illegally
I remember getting into a hugeass argument in HS with one person who was as into comics as me because I shipped Gambit and a dude (I forget which dude because it was like 10 years ago) rather than Gambit and Rogue (who at the time I shipped with Storm, I think? Juuust cuz I think in some Storm storylines, she’s basically untouchable at home because she’s seen as a living god so I figured the two could relate a lot more to having others both in awe of and terrified by their powers – and yeah she was straight in the comics at the time but come the fuck on if a woman like her is straight, I’m a fucking pretzel. And the fact that she’s only ever been shown in comics as having het relationships is not a dealbreaker: A lot of bi folks, me included, have het relationships as the majority of their romantic history, if only because there are more people who are het than non and it’s safer to explore het attraction than non. Buuuutyeah. I’ve never seen Storm as straight, even when she was straight in canon. And even before they revealed her as bi, they were hinting at it for decades.
… I’ve also never seen her as cis, but that’s another story. She’s one I’ve headcannoned as trans preeetty much since I was familiar enough with trans stuff to spot hints at it. It would require an entire essay to explain why but the cliff’s notes version is that her character arcs in pretty much every series she’s in have always paralleled a trans self-realization and coming out process.
(on that note: how fucking amazing would it be for there to be an X-Men movie where Laverne Cox plays Storm?)
. . . I wondered why people hated that show, I loved it, and I still liked it after watching it as an adult.
The problem with this argument is that you then are saying that if it was too smart to get mass ratings, anything that did get mass ratings must have been not smart right?
If she had argued it had been too niche, I wouldn’t say anything, but “too smart” is usually the battle cry of people who have unreasonably high opinions of themselves, and very low opinions of everyone else. THEY were smart enough to understand it. Unlike the unwashed masses.
It is such an eyeroll thing. It reminds me of the hordes of Donnie Darko fans that insist it is this deep something when it’s really just a hot mess.
Look at what she’s actually OFFERING for her argument. ‘smart’ doesn’t mean ‘engages in things geeks like’. ‘Smart’ is talking about gender in a way that resonates with her. And that is straight up not a thing pretty much any TV will do.
It’s a shitty word choice that actually does do Bad Things to discourse, but it’s not actually talking about your big problem here. And riding this hobby horse is not going to go well rn.
Yeah, and talking about gender in a way that resonates with trans people or talking about relationships in a way that resonates with general queer people is actually one of those things that does make networks super antsy and more prone to cancel or “edit” a series. Especially if it’s gotten the attention of the religious right, because “that sort of politics isn’t appropriate for kids”.
She’s using the wrong word for it, because she’s still a nerd and ranting about how the thing you like is too smart for the plebes is a somewhat messed up nerd tradition, but what she’s describing is a real situation that happens.
And then Lucy joins the conversation and starts arguing about Young Justice. They stay until the heat death of the universe.
The vitriol cause by that ‘discussion’ will probably push it back at least a few million years.
I think Lucy and Malaya are in another floor/wing/building
Your Lucy Is In Another Building?
She’ll find a way.
Love this! I have been both Carla and Walky at different times about various of my interests, especially TV shows and movies and fandoms and such, and I’ve argued about them just as passionately.
I feel like this exact conversation is RIGHT NOW, at this moment in time, going on on probably every college campus in the world. (tho prooooooobably not about Dexter & Ultra Car, since they don’t exist, but WHO KNOWS? xD)
Well fuck, now I need Ultra Car to be a real TV show cause that sounds kinda great.
Would this, by any chance, be commentary on that cartoon that got cancelled because too many girls were watching it….welp, shit, I tried googling to find the name (I thought it was Birds of Prey but wasn’t sure) and found this happens kind of depressingly often.
I’ll bet in-universe that Ultracar wasn’t watched by kids at all but had a big mass appeal to high school girls and boys when it was designed for a much younger audience.
Young Justice!
http://io9.gizmodo.com/paul-dini-superhero-cartoon-execs-dont-want-largely-f-1483758317
And it was awesome. Prob the most character driven mainstream superhero show ever. its way better written than Arrowverse, or Snyderverse.
( yes, I’m sorry, But it even KILLS Timmverse-TAS. I know thats sacrilegious on this board, but YJ is just better on every level )
Girls were watching because it was good. yeah, it had a lot of female characters… ( compared to most ) , one who were well-written, complex and some anti-heroes. Ditto for the male. It had a gender and race diverse cast because it was written that way from the ground-up —- without tokens.
It drew on a massive amount of DC lore and characters.
Damn Its just breaks my brain that they killed an excellent and popular show… because girls liked it too!
*monocle!*
Better than Timmverse?!?
Oh God, I hate it when series is cancelled for being to good. Every so often I’ll watch a new show and think, “Hey, this is pretty good.” I’ll watch a bit more and think, “Wow, this is really good.” Then I’ll watch a bit more and think, “Aw shit, it’s too good. They’ll cancel it after less than half a season.”, and they do.
I feel you man, I feel you.
This was my initial reaction to Galavant being cancelled earlier this year. Such a shame
This is my greatest fear concerning Steven Universe.
Steven Universe got renewed for a full two further seasons immediately after the first season finished. We’re only about halfway through the shows confirmed run, and there may be even more after that, although I have a sneaking suspicion that Rebecca Sugar will pull an Alex Hirsch and end it when the story she wants to tell is complete.
Both shows sound terrible. What’s the DOA-verse’s equivalent of steven universe
Steven Universe?
Probably. They have My Little Pony, after all, and I assume they’re on G4 just like us since their tech and such advances whenever ours does.
then, yeah they’re both wrong
Wait… Dead people can’t know .that I owned them!?
You, madame, have just changed my *life*!
Re: the punchline:
Tomorrow’s comic is four wordless panels of Dina eating cereal.
Behind a door!
Given how hyper she has been all weekend I kinda doubt she has that peace of mind until Becky comes back.
NERD FIGHT! NERD FIGHT!
This reminds me of the old arguments between the Simpsons and the Critic.
They’re going to end up screwing, aren’t they?
Nope.
Do thumbscrews count?
…..
…. wait no I didn’t want that mental image where’s the brianbleach?
So, now we learn something about Walky and Carla that we never knew before: They’re both nerds!
Poor Dorothy! She doesn’t even have the escape route of leaving them to it and going to visit with Joyce until they’re done. Instead she has to stand there and listen to all those words that probably only have meaning to fans of those shows!
… We’ve always known that about Walky.
And Carla set up a Rube Goldberg machine with fricking laser holograms.
Reminds me of this:
http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1491
Surprisingly, everyone else in the world is quietly having the same argument. They’re using different words so you can’t tell, but definitely still the same argument.
carla you’re so relatable
There is no rage like nerd rage^^
adamantinum rageeeee
Is that better or worse than Brooklyn Rageeee?
probably worse since the adamantium rage could be caused by adamantium poisoning making the person emotionally unstable
So in this universe, Ultra Car was clearly gendered while still a car?
Well, I mean Ultra Car was clearly gendered while still a car, it’s just everyone was wrong because male is the default human.
I mean Ultra Car in the other universe not the one in the cartoon.
IIRC SP!Ultra Car did originally begin as genderless and everyone just referred to her as male, but as her AI developed she eventually realized that she identified as female. I like to think that this was something in the show, that Ultra Car realized that it was right to refer to herself as a girl, and that it was what she always was.
Probably hit Lil’ Carla right where she needed it to.
I have decided Ultracar was designed to be a show for really small kids with pies in the face but the writers made it with a lot of quirky surrealism that appealed to high schoolers and college kids who watched it instead. It was also a show for boys but the fact it was watched by mostly women also sunk it. It wasn’t actually all that smart but it was something which would appeal to Carla strongly as Ultracar becomes a girl in the final episode she saw online (actually part of a reboot to rebrand it for its proper audience).
Dexter and Monkey Master is effectively Dragonballz as it strikes me as perfectly designed for someone like Walky to think is the greatest thing ever while also being something you either got or didn’t.
Well, half Dragonballz Z and half Naruto.
So its like if Young Justice was about cars.
Now make Joyce watch the Ultra Car show with Carla.
Dammit,
Its like Young Justice all over again
The thing is I remember something EXACTLY like this happening back at the end of the “Aughties”, an anime that was intended to sell boy’s toys here in the US became wildly popular with girls for the art and storytelling and got cancelled by Cartoon Network. Unfortunately I no longer remember the title because that was a while back and there was only the one season.
Big O? No, that had a second season.
Big O got a second season BECAUSE of Cartoon Network, even. Sunrise dropped it because ‘batman with giant robot’ was already sort of covered in Japan by Banjo Haran, and in any case wasn’t as popular an idea. But CN was making a bunch of money, so they bankrolled season 2.
I’m starting to think Cartoon Network might have a problem.
That would probably be Sym-Bionic Titan, mentioned above.
it was awful that sym-bionic titan was cancelled. it couldve gone places. and theres still no dvd of it
Alt text… why are you saying that alt text? Do you want us to panic, alt text? Why do you want us to panic, alt text?
*sweat drop* OH BOB, CHECK ON RUTH! :c
Nah, it’s only saying that everyone is already checking on Ruth. Between Billie and Carla she is practically coddles.
Right?
So you see, there is no need for panic.
Right?
Nah, she be ded bro.
There is probably a reason the next chapter is called Glower Vacuum…
Hey look, it’s Tumblr fandoms condensed into a comic.
It is all fandom. Everywhere, everywhen.
They used to have to do it in person, at gatherings and conventions, or in letters delivered by post, or in the mimeographed and stapled pages of “zines”. Now, we have the internet.
3000* years ago, fandoms of one religion slaughtered fandoms of another religion.
*and also at other times
Fortunately, I tend to hang in the sort of circles where phrasing it as “my imaginary friend can beat up yours!” is not considered blasphemy and/or a mortal sin.
Is there a reader here who doesn’t have shows they could slot right into this conversation?
Asking for a friend. Who’s still salty about Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. And the He-Man and Thundercats reboots.
Mumble mumble Carol Danvers would be running things in season 3 grumble rumble
This is obviously a case, like most fan arguments, where both Carla and Walkie are wrong. The real reason Ultra Car got canceled was a cease and desist order from Chevron. They don’t like their Techron Car mascots getting infringed on and this would probably be about the time they had their joint advertising campaign at Disney’s Autopia attraction.
Oh my god…this is almost exactly my argument on CN canning Generator Rex vs. Extending the Ben 10 series.
In fact I still feel sore over how they curbed Rex and kept mediocre Ben10.
….RRRRAAAAAAAAGGGHHHHH!!! REOPENED WOUND!
I’ve still only seen the first couple seasons of the first Ben 10 spin-off.
But Generator Rex was QUALITY.
Aaah…the start of a beautiful friendship.
Well, everyone else in the world is doing worse than you Dorothy… except Galasso, Galasso is doing just fine
galasso’s always gonna do fine while he still has GALASSO’S PIZZA AND SUBS
i want to hear the rest of their conversation
Comic Reactions:
Panel 1: I love that she emphasizes her pacifism and that she’s not a murderer. And it’s a sad commentary too, because a lot of people do actually believe that trans person and especially trans woman = scary psycho murderer.
But it also underlies a lot of her general behavior. She talks a big game and wants to be seen as tough, but she also is extremely down on violence in general (being a trans girl, likely by having experienced it a lot first hand).
Plus, it also shows her similarity to Walky in that both her and him have a lot invested in their self-image of themselves as intelligent. Carla uses her “smarts” as part of her revenge scheme and advertises it as a reason to not fuck with her. And Walky has been struggling with having to adapt to actually needing to study and try in academics because of too much invested in his idea of him being smart.
I love little parallels like that.
Panel 2: Ha! I love the SP! callback:
http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=2061
Also, Carla is diving into this flamewar with both feet and by similarly insulting Walky’s golden cow cartoon series, has brought the flames to a nice roaring fire.
Panel 3: And here Walky echoes the battlecry of asshole nerdom gatekeepers everywhere in pretending that commercially popular is inherently the same thing as “good” and that his own tastes override those of others.
And no, I don’t think he’s being evil or bad here, just faceplanting on his privilege a little. I mean, for fuck’s sake, he’s doubling down on the “no one” was watching it theme, which is one of those things that is especially galling for marginalized folks, because they so often get relegated to that “no one” zone, because anyone who isn’t the default human might as well not exist.
And trans people get hit with those messages hard, especially these days, because one of the attack vectors at the moment is how trans people are such a teeny tiny “unimportant” amount of the overall public and so how dare they demand “all this social re-engineering” to accommodate such a “meaninglessly small” amount of people.
This is also used to shit on trans people who complain about transphobic characters or plotlines, because not being shitty to trans people is apparently “kowtowing to the PC demands of a tiny portion of the population” and so on.
Panel 4: Aw, the rallying cry of every marginalized geek ever. The stuff that resonates tends to be super niche and not conventionally popular and the few things that break out in a big public way tend to be mishandled by advertisers, networks, and so on that just don’t know how to handle works that don’t fit the usual mode of appealing to white boys from the much vaunted teen or pre-teen demographics.
For a lot of people in charge of making major media decisions, the notion that there are people other than white men who could be into things is baffling and frightening and they don’t know how to handle it (see all the studio confusion about how to handle the fact that women are seeing action movies that have female leads or the musical world dustup about Hamilton or the network confusion about OITNB and Sense8 being successful or the comic industry’s confusion every time a feminist woman writer’s work is wildly popular among women and so on…).
And every marginalized person has that story about that work that super resonated with them that either suddenly pushed back against the notion that they were “one of those shows” (often by killing a marginalized character and replacing them with a straighter white man) or was prematurely axed.
I also love how bitter Carla is that this thing that mattered so much to her was destroyed because people believed its toys wouldn’t sell. It’s clear that that’s a hurt she still has and that it informs a particular type of feminist and queer politics of hers that has been hinted at in places.
Plus, how important it is that Ultra Car was a sarcastic girl robot, with the girl part being emphasized.
Panel 5: “challenged what we think we know about ourselves” and “subverting tropes about gender”. Aw, yep, that’s the magical formula to getting yourself a lot of trans fans who use the work to figure out they are trans.
And I love this little exchange, because it’s such a good character moment. Of course Walky is all about the humor and the cultural references. He values the silly and humorous and that’s what he views a cartoon as being for.
But equally notable is Carla’s points which are all about personal impact and deep themes. Because those can be the fertile waters of self-discovery and a work that resonates and reflects a life experience literally no other work reflects can be extremely potent to marginalized folks of all stripes.
I’ve noted before how important Carla is as a character to me simply because she’s literally the only homoromantic ace trans woman character in any form of media I have encountered. Because that type of representation matters and makes you feel alone. Seeing Nomi from Sense8 being represented like actual trans women I know rather than the standard models of trans stereotypes was revolutionary because I never expected to see it. And it’s why a lot of non-binary trans people are all over Steven Universe.
Being reflected in media, having themes resonate in media is something white cis straight dudes tend to take for granted, but it is everything for marginalized folks and it breeds some mad loyalty.
And more than that is the trans egg work. The work that speaks to a baby trans on such a meaningful level, reflecting a reality that they didn’t even dare dream to imagine before they were even able to accept it. The work that resonates so thoroughly it ends up being the work you steal your name from.
These works are… I don’t fully know how to describe their importance to an individual trans person, but they can hold a very very special place in a young trans person’s life because it’s the work that finally broke through all the social messaging and answered the question of alienation they were always feeling or hinted at the true self they’d been running from for forever.
Like Carla, I stole my real name from a piece of fiction that resonated before I ever realized I was trans. In hindsight the trans parallels were rife and the character’s resonances are somewhat obvious. But at the time, I was simply drawn as I had been to other works that hinted at the person I would later realize I was in a way that had me casually using that name in countless game’s “what is your name” screens.
And like Carla, I’d probably go on a rant if someone started ignorantly slagging it. Because the works that you take your name from are truly special and important and a part of you.
And I’m so happy that Carla had a work like that to resonate with her in the comic world even if it was prematurely cancelled and slagged by other cartoon fans.
Doubleplusagreed
Tripletimesagreed.
Also, Willis and Rebecca Sugar should totally make an Ultra Car cartoon.
All the plus and highfives and internet points (and, sure, some cake too). This is why representation is so incredibly important (one of the reasons…).
Also points for noticing the similarities between Carla and Walky. I’m sure they can have lots of fun together… or annoy the crap out of each other. Either or.
The bit about advertisers reminds me of what happened with Star Wars: The Force Awakens merch. The geniuses in charge of marketing action figures didn’t think anyone would be interested in Rey. ‘Cos she might be the hero and utterly awesome, but she’s a girl so meh. They were so, so wrong- what figures of Rey did get released, vanished off the shelves within days.
(Come to think of it, they didn’t exactly push Finn figures, either- but that white X-wing pilot guy who gets less than a fifth of Finn’s screentime? All over the place.)
To be perfectly honest, I at first didn’t think Poe was supposed to be white. I good have sworn he was Latino. I mean, I guess maybe a Mediterranean white, or (because it still shows up as such on census forms) a middle-eastern white, but I really had to think hard when told Poe was white, because for the life of me I didn’t know he was.
Oscar Isaacs is Guatemalan, and Poe Dameron’s from Yavin IV because the ending of A New Hope was shot there.
As I’m sure has been said many times over, Cerberus, thank you again (and for all the times in the past) that you’ve levied your insight into written form.
I know that it takes a long time, but is always an enjoyable and insightful read. Often poiinting out things that I had missed while reading through the comic.
Yes yes and so much yes, representation matters so much and I get SO frustrated when the characters I ID with get maligned for the crime of not being perfect and well-together while marginalized because half the time that’s the part I ID with they’re shitting on.
I like Dumbing of Age, Cerberus, but honestly I half come here for your write-ups now.
Oh, also worth noting that this isn’t the first time that Walky has pulled this sort of bullshit geekdom gatekeeping:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/02-choosing-my-religion/memorized/
….why is dorothy dating walky again?
He’s got abs like he’s sculpted out of caramel.
And fully believes in her dreams one hundred percent.
i think him believing in her that much is really the only thing i like about walky
so shes only in it for his abs?
Absolutely!
You just couldn’t do it, could you. You couldn’t abstain.
It’s cool how this kind of stuff always happens in my absence.
… That was abominable.
To be fair to Walky, I think he would have challenged ANYONE who said that they had memorized the episode, man, woman, or otherwise, to repeat the lines.
Also, I’m not sure that saying prove it to someone saying they’ve memorized something is gatekeeping. I mean, he wasn’t saying she had to have it memorized to be a real fan, only that if she is going to claim to have memorized it, she should prove it.
That is absolutely bullshit, especially since she wasn’t saying it as part of an extended exercise in nerd machismo. She was saying it as part of why she wasn’t going to spend time doing things for fun – I have engaged in this exercise enough. That she happens to have that precise episode memorized isn’t actually material, because more likely she was speaking coloquially, and even if SHE wasn’t, most would.
Nerd machismo’s relationship to gatekeeping is probably not unidirectional, but it’s not actually an excuse to challenge people who are just sitting around or being polite, and engaging with it is not generally a good call to start with since it validates it. You can let people say they know a lot, or think they know a lot. That it’s unfairly levelled MORE against women or other people who don’t fit the mold is a thing, but it’s not like it’s okay just for that reason. It’s dumb and discourages fandom in the first place. So yeah, what Walky did was shit.
I’ve been asked the same thing because people know that I know a lot about some specific pop culture subjects.
It can annoying, but I just don’t engage with it if I don’t feel like and I ignore it. And it was from someone very much like Walky.
If you claim you know a lot about a subject, don’t be surprised if you get asked questions.
That is not saying that someone can not know as much as I do and still be a fan. They absolutely can. But there is a difference between me saying “I’m a fan of the X-Men” and “I have read every X-Men related comic from the 1960s to 2007”. Both of which are true, but if I say the latter, I’m not surprised when someone asks me questions to show off my knowledge.
Yeah, but that only tends to happen to women and other marginalized folk and that tends to happen to said folk even if they say “I like X”.
And it very much tends to be based in a type of gatekeeping as well as the nerd version of a pissing contest.
Even in the example cited, Dorothy is using hyperbole to argue for skipping an episode that isn’t doing it for her when she decided to come over for cartoon watching because the Joyce thing just happened and she needed to decompress from being main support. And Walky does the pfft, I don’t believe you, prove your hyperbole bullshit.
And it gets frustrated because especially women encounter this shit all the time, everywhere we go and it is used not only on meaningless fan stuff but to question our qualifications on literally everything. And yes, it’s a gender thing, the same thing didn’t happen to nearly the same degree when I still presented as male to the world:
http://www.robot-hugs.com/technigal/
Hell, he even ends the comic referenced above still dismissing her chops after she did what he asked and then disparaging her qualifications regarding D&MM for reasons he admits in a later comic were mostly about her ruining his plans to train his future gf in how to watch D&MM right by knowing the show better than him.
Like, he’s definitely got a lot of the toxic behaviors of nerddom gatekeeping in him.
I guess a way to put it is; whynotboth.gif
‘Cause Dorothy did make a very specific claim that Walky asked her to prove, and it is also possible that a noted sexist butthole would more easily doubt the validity of that claim because Dorothy’s a woman.
Because people /talk/. And one of the things people do when they talk is engage in minor hyperbole or otherwise inaccurate claims, when they are minor. It isn’t actually important if the fish was THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS big, or whether someone used this EXACT choice of words that makes them look slightly worse.
Just because most people do it, doesn’t actually mean it’s ipso facto good! This is combined with “This is leveraged unfairly on The Wrong Kind of Fan”, tho, and I sure as fuck don’t see a GOOD reason to start questioning every minor hyperbolic claim. And really, what’s the harm? Either you have a dunning kruger who will label anything they didn’t remember as irrelevant, or you don’t, and the march of time in a fandom will demonstrate to them that they know nothing, Jon Snow, without your going out of your way to shame them. What’s it to YOU that someone wrongly thinks they know everything about Pokemon, or Star Wars, or whatever?
That’s pretty much my reading as well. He’s doing it because he’s a nerd and that’s the nerd equivalent of a flex off. But nerds are more likely to do it to women who know their shit because women who know their nerd shit make male nerds who are insecure about their maledom feel insecure and thus more likely to demand these pose offs.
Also why his ending point is a saving face dismissal over the fact that she rose to his challenge and goalpost moving.
Like, I don’t think Walky’s being an intentional douche like so many douchey nerd types in reality, just stumbling into it, because he does have some macho insecurity issues and some negative geek gatekeeping traits.
Basically, if we were to take the weather report of his actions in comic, it’s more privilege fail with periodic showers of annoying gatekeeping and smug superiority rather than hostile with an incoming dangerous front.
My main point is still that I don’t think that Walky’s actions are based anywhere in sexism. While its annoying (and I even mentioned it was annoying, I’ve had someone try to do a “nerd flexoff” with my Star Wars knowledge and would not let it go even after I tried to ignore it), and probably socially dumb, I just don’t read the sexism in it at all.
He really does seem like the type of person who would do this to anyone. It is unfortunate that it happens more often to women, but that alone doesn’t make it sexist on his part if he would treat anyone the same. Even if it is a stupid nerd flexoff thing which is socially silly.
Rutee-
It can also get really toxic when combined with the “they’re faking knowledge to steal attention” gatekeeping thing. Like, questioning someone’s fidelity to a material based on their memorization of random trivia is pretty whatever and weird and all, but can get really nasty when it is used to “prove” that someone in the fan community is “faking knowledge” and thus only in it to steal the attention and eyeballs that the more privileged folks “know” is intended only for them.
I’ll take someone randomly fronting like they know a ton of trivia about something than that bullshit any day of the week.
Also marginalized folks end up being terrorized by that into not offering any opinion about a work unless they are prepared to back that up with copious notes. And now everyone knows how I built up my reflexive habit of backing up statements with archive binges when requested.
Touchfuzzy-
Well, I mean male machismo displays and flexoffs are still rooted in a type of societal sexism as is the impulse to do them more frequently for women in geekdom (owing to the way most geek pursuits are seen as the domain of men).
Societal sexism is not quite the same thing as someone screaming misogynist slurs 24/7, but can definitely be a social problem exacerbating and creating issues of inequality and minor annoyances.
Again, I don’t think it says anything about Walky personally other than he is a geek and this is an aspect of typically male geekdom that can be frustrating for women.
Whether it happens more often to women doesn’t mean that Walky is doing it because Dorothy is a woman though. That is entirely an interpretation, and jumping to very negative conclusions.
He really does seem like the type that would ask ANYONE the same questions.
Well, in comic so far he’s only done the aggressive gatekeeping to women. What that means is open to analysis and question, but it definitely reflects a real world reality that many women geeks experience with regards to their interests and so it naturally lends itself to that interpretation.
Like, I’m not saying he’s a bad person or needs to be pilloried. He’s just doing that frustrating insecure male geek thing that can be annoying when you’re a girl geek.
Have we even seen another male character who was into D&MM though? I don’t think we’ve seen a situation in which he COULD have done the same thing to a male character.
The only super D&MM fans I’ve seen in the strip are Walky, Dorothy, and Joyce.
Yes, he theoretically could, but he doesn’t and Occam’s razor in this case favors the regularly observed social phenomenon rather than the Occam’s big paisley tie* of the theoretical possibility of him being like this with dude fans (and that wouldn’t prove much other than this is, as is observed, about a geek form of machismo and “proving how smart he is” by engaging in it).
I mean, I really am not saying he’s a bad person. Rather that he is stumbling into some annoying frequently occurring behavior unintentionally.
I mean, that’s the deal of privilege. Doing something unintentionally frustrating for a group because it’s not really on your radar in the same way and it doesn’t feel out of the norm to the person doing the behavior.
*http://www.shakesville.com/2013/08/occams-big-paisley-tie.html
I find this disingenuous. Basically saying that it has to be sexism because we’ve never seen him react in a similar situation with a male character, when he has NEVER BEEN IN THAT SITUATION is hardly Occam’s Razor.
There is a difference between an equally plausible answer (he would do it to anyone, and we don’t know otherwise because he has never been in that situation in the comic), and an entirely unlikely big paisley tie explanation.
“Wally is behaving in a way that is common of people in this demographic” is occam’s razor. “Wally is different and doesn’t engage in sexism through magical means of understanding the problems while still looking like he reinforces them in every way” is a paisley tie.
It doesn’t even honestly matter if he ‘does this to everyone’. It just makes him even more insufferable. Neither of us is saying he is a secret misogynist in his heart of hearts. He’s reinforcing bullshit gatekeeping on women. Whether that’s his intention actually doesn’t matter. Whether that’s the net effect of /his/ actions doesn’t actually matter. Whether he acknowledges it or not, he exists in a culture that does some misogynist shit. When he does the same shit, he’s reinforcing that culture – regardless of exigent circumstances.
These aren’t, by any means, high crimes, but they do indicate you shouldn’t be doing this kind of gatekeeping, period. Nothing good comes of it.
Rutee-
You put it way better than I did.
But yeah, this.
Walky is just a cartoon elitist for sure, I loved it when it bit him back though:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/02-i-was-a-teenage-churchmouse/freezeframe/
And now we know why Carla prefers the non lethal utility of pies.
This remembers me of Young Justice. I only got into it after it ended, but I heard about why it ended.
*reminds me. Sorry.
Jacqueline Rose on trans narratives: “Who do you think you are.”
A long read.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n09/jacqueline-rose/who-do-you-think-you-are
“But for Stryker, mutilation is at once a badge of honour and a counter to the myth of nature in a pure state. There is no body without debilitation and pain. We are all made up of endlessly permuting bits and pieces which sometimes do, mostly do not, align with each other. We are all always adjusting, manipulating, perfecting, sometimes damaging (sometimes perfecting and damaging) ourselves.”
damn
(yikes at some of the letters by TERFs/TERF sympathizers at the end though)
…and then they fucked.
And then they hugged.
Hugged, had a soda, and then bonded by binging both shows and comparing notes on them.
It took me a few hours of Wiki-walking through the Walkyverse wiki to understand the context of today’s strip.
And it was totally worth it.
It’s a good thing Carla doesn’t like Monkey Master or Walky would say she’s a Fake Fan.
Batman TAS (from memory)
Robin: It’s Christmas eve — nothing is happening — let’s go home and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the 1000th time.
Batman: I’ve never seen it. I couldn’t get past the title.
#KeepBingingUltraCar
Yeah, I’ve been in arguments like this. Where the two of us go so deep into philosophy and meta-culture that most people’s eyes just glaze over and they walk away.
Over half the comments are lengthy rants about one show or another.
You bunch of nerds <3
Alt-text: You have made me very nervous.
Dotty, go do that. Please.
I really like all the small touches here. That Carla is annoyed at the idea that she would actually hurt someone, and her main argument for why she loved Ultra Car isn’t that it was funny, but for impact it had on her and had a lot of smart stuff to say about gender roles. I could rattle on about why I love Steven Universe for an hour before I actually got to talking about the plot or the characters.
I just really hope Carla isn’t like me… The idea that I’m a ragemonster who would actually hurt people has come up a lot in my life, and I utterly hate it, because, well, I’m trying desperately to be tiny and cute and unscary. It’s something trans girls face a lot. =<
Yeah, I’m thinking that’s why Carla was so offended that Dorothy thinks she would actually hurt Walky, and why her way of asserting power is through being a wacky unstoppable badass prankster. Like Mary says, Carla could have done anything, and Carla strikes back by hitting her in the face with a pie and spelling her name in lights.
And I think it creates a really interesting character, where Carla knows that she’s going to get shit and has to assure people that she’s unthreatening, but also refuses to take anything lying down.
I don’t think anyone actually THINKS Carla’ll murder them, I think it’s just hyperbole and Carla knows it. She’s just very good at including it into her side of the arguments.
Although her reasoning is awesome, and explains why when she does prank it’s not meant to harm.
Spencer-
Yeah, it builds a very interesting form of activism she’s doing where she makes sure there is always a response to aggression that is thorough and discourages the person harassing her from continuing the harassment, but is also aggressively non-violent and leaves little room for those she retaliates against to claim they have been attacked (not that that stopped bigots from trying to argue that Carla is a “violent man who physically assaulted Mary” because of the pie to the face).
And it makes a lot of sense, because it seems well informed by her identity and her likely background and is the sorta thing I’d sometimes see in the politically aware trans college kids I would mentor.
3-I –
I identify with that so much, cause that pressure can get really annoying at times and I tend to get it double because I’m DID as well which adds a whole ‘nother layer to the anger policing (because somehow despite having a 20+ year record of never losing my cool in a dangerous way, I must always be an inch away from snapping like in the movies, right?). Add to that having a longtime partner who didn’t allow me to express any strong emotions whatsoever and especially not anger, even if directed at fucked up things happening to me and would berate me if I showed the slightest hint that things bothered me (she had her own mental health reasons for doing that, but still it was a bit rough) and having a very large butch frame… It adds up to some crippling accumulated baggage about showing my anger in person.
And it means internalizing way too many things that upset me and worrying way too much about coming off as “aggressive” in my responses to things that are upsetting.*
*One of the nastiest traps for trans women is that if we ever dare yell and scream about all the accumulated transphobia that gets heaped on us, we get dinged for “showing our true colors” and “revealing our male aggression” and that gets used to deny our gender as well as the anger. And we tend to get hit with the “girls aren’t allowed to be angry” trope on top of that bullshit.
*basically hugs forever, if that’s okay.*
You are too amazing a person for it to ever be okay for someone to silence you, and I’m so so sorry that you have to worry about this.
hugs
Aw they made friends!
Ohh, it was one of THOSE shows that got canceled for THOSE reasons.
Yeah I’m firmly on Carla’s side here. *Still. bitter. about DC Nation.*
Oh look, it’s every ‘discussion’ on the Internets about anything, ever, except IRL! xD
So Ultracar is the Young Justice of the Dumingverse? Frankly I’ve had this exact conversation about half the stuff on Cartoon network.
NERDFIGHT!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAwWPadFsOA
Ye gods, people! It’s only a cartoon.
True Story: I’ve been a fan of Ultra Car since 1990, way before it was cool.
Hopefully netflix reboots it soon
I hope that Dorothy watches Ultracar now!
Can the last panel of the previous comic and the first panel of this one be a t-shirt? Or at least the first panel of this one?
“Dead people can’t know that I totally *owned* them.” is awesome but I will never be able to use it since no one is going to accuse me of wanting to kill someone.