16348--Through the Fire

Is it possible to be evil, but still PC?  Can the hero be the hero, but seen as weaker than everyone else around?  Heroes and villains can both be inspirational examples for an audience as they overcome the adversities brought onto them by their own bodies.  Finding the strength to do so brings with it the label of having strong character, which is a trait good main characters are supposed to have.


Despite a severed spine, crushed bones and heart damage topping their lists, Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark refused to accept being disabled.  Both Batman and Iron Man have been able to continue their harrowing careers, not just through judicious application of their wealth and advanced medical technology but through determination in the face of otherwise debilitating injuries.  Likewise, Captain Hook and Long John Silver never let their respective amputations get in the way of their respective ambitions.  Barbara Gordon had to stop being Batgirl when the Joker put her into a wheelchair, but she gained an even greater level of fan loyalty as she became the unique, behind-the-scenes hero support known as Oracle.  As Oracle, the dedicated researcher found new purpose for herself by providing information to other superheroes through the internet.


Anakin Skywalker grew to impress his fellow Jedi with his skills, but could only go so far as a whiny orphan.  It wasn't until he became Darth Vader--asthmatic, quadriplegic, killer cyborg--that he became truly daunting and made people run for cover.  When was the last time you saw a kid with an inhaler and prosthetic legs bully anybody?  Never, that's when.  Vader took it and ran...well, walked menacingly with it.  Was that a handicapped placard on that Super Star Destroyer?  No, but you go ahead and park where you like, your lordship sir.


Before he joined the X-Men, the mutant creative genius known as Forge lost a hand and half of a leg.  No, he wasn't thrilled about it, but he used his mutant gift to cobble together his own replacement parts and went on to build all sorts of nifty sci-fi toys for the government.


Professor Xavier may have been zipping about in his wheelchair for years before Oracle but he's not the only one.  Niles Caulder, "The Chief" to the Doom Patrol, has been so attached to his wheels that he only wanted to collect "oddballs" (aka "freaks") to work for him.  Not content to just find them, maybe he didn't want to have to grapple with accessibility issues, this mastermind engineered schemes that even Samuel Jackson's Mr. Glass didn't approach in order to create recruits for his team.  From the comfy seat of his own wheelchair, The Chief ultimately went so far as to even perform the harvesting of a living brain (landmark surgery from our POV) following the "accident" that destroyed the body of  Cliff Steel and installing it into a shiny new life support system: an advanced, humanoid robot body that has protected his brain through probably as many body replacements as Iron Man has suits of armor.  Still, his brain has been his greatest obstacle: understandably depressed over his total body amputation, Robotman has been known to sit inert for long periods of time.


Just as Robotman has had years of artifically extended life as one of comicdoms favorite brain-in-a-box characters, one of the Doom patrol's perennial foes has been The Brain, who really is just a genius brain-in-a-box.  His only custom features are life support and communications.  His main henchman, an intelligent gorilla, even has to lug his boss around, so I guess that just proves how rare a cool body like Robotman's really is.  Look at all the trouble OCP had duplicating the success of the original Robocop.


Other selectively modified cyborgs have sported as little as an artificial eye up to half their bodies.  Most commonly among them has seemed to be the need to deal with the attendant emotional issues of anger and loss.  Unique among them, Cyborg of the Teen Titans chose to spend some of his spare time mentoring amputee children.  Most others, like the lesser-known Secret Six (whose team name would explain their lack of fame) and the more famous Robocop, Steve Austin, Jamie Sommers and a few other bionic part recipients who joined their small-screen exploits (among them a young Sandra Bullock in their final movie) ignored their emotional issues rather than working through them and threw themselves headlong into the dangerous work that they were rebuilt to do for as long as they had audiences. 


Steve and Jamie continued television work, while the others went on to other endeavors.

16325--Drive That Truck Yourself

You're done with your story?  You've finished the rewrite, too?  Are you sure it all makes sense?  Maybe it's more of a problem with Hollywood, because we know how crazy things can be out there, and less of an issue with novels.  A Hollywood script has a lot of people messing with the final product by the time it goes from first draft to screen and most of those people won't be writers.  When you're a novelist, you're also handling the rewrites even when several people give you editorial input.  Then, you're going to want to make sure you've done all you can to make sure everything makes sense.  If you don't find the plot holes before your audience does, then someone else is going to drive the truck through them.  You want to take care of them before you unleash them on the world.

I was sitting at home this weekend and watching some of the Star Wars films.  Episode IV was running (the first film for those of you trying to keep track in your heads) and the original death star was maneuvering into orbit around the planet Yavin.  The rebel base was on a moon on the far side.  In a mere thirty minutes, the rebels would meet their fiery doom as the powerful, planet-killing beam obliterated the defenseless moon.  Or maybe they could just give the order to fire on Yavin itself.  Destroying the planet would devastate its moons.  Even if it didn't, there would certainly be a clear path for a second shot.  It had already been established that Tarkin, and by extension the emperor, had no qualms with destroying even peaceful worlds just to make a point.  What were they waiting for?  I didn't know and I shouldn't have been looking for an explanation.  That should've been covered in the storytelling.

The third X-Men film, "The Last Stand", showed us Jean Grey standing around a lot waiting for a chance to be bad.  Sure, she had already gotten rid of Scott and the professor, but those were private matters.  The X-Men had shown they were willing to deal with her mental instability internally and not hold her responsible for those lapses.  It was only after she had committed her public killing of the soldiers that her friends decided they would have to kill Jean to stop her.  Or would they?  Since the story had led everyone to converge on Alcatraz where the mutation-neutralizing boy was being kept securely, the heroic X-Men just had to turn him into Jean Grey's new BFF to get her under control.  Once again, problem solved and film ended early.  The problem, once again, was that that only happened in my head and I was left to wonder why instead of the story telling me why not.

I will repeat: You do not want the audience finding your gaping plot holes.  If that happens, you will look stupid or lazy to the people who gave you a chance to entertain them.  That will likely mean you won't get the chance again.  Granted, even though the whole Star Wars incident led to me re-plotting episodes I, II and III to do what Mr. Lucas should've done, I will continue to take chances on him.  The rest of us have a bit more work to do to build that loyal a platform.  That means we have to take the time to be thorough and aware on the front end.  No, your writing certainly doesn't have to be perfect, but your rewriting needs to show that you were striving to get there.

16310--So, you wrote a story. Who cares?

     If you're going to take the time and use the energy to string words together coherently, you should have a good reason for spilling them out of your head in the first place.  I would think you're either trying to take some of the workload off your memory or communicate something to others.  When I write here or produce some bit of fiction, it's with the expectation that what I write will be read by others.  With that in mind, I make the effort to write things that will be of some interest to other people.

     When you're writing a work of fiction, it's likely going to be populated with characters who move your story along from point-to-point.  Those characters can't be mindless mules schlepping the tale on their backs.  They have to seem as real and interesting as anyone that every reader knows, with lives and purpose all their own.  Dress them up, furnish the living room and slap some paint on their walls.  When the readers are able to empathize with these characters, they will take an interest in them and care about what happens to them.  I was never turned off more quickly about feeling for a character I was reading as at the moment I saw that she didn't care about what was happening to her in her own story.  In what had been a story that was holding my interest, the protagonist was suddenly composing a to-do list while being raped.  I asked myself, "If she doesn't care what's happening to her, why should I?"  I closed the book and never went back.

     As a corollary to this, fiction writers who are building their own worlds (and we should know who we are) must build them with rules.  Sure, part of the fun of a magical or superscience world is that things can happen there that don't happen in the world we happen to live in every day.  Despite that, it still needs to have some degree of structure.  The reader will come to your work with an expectation of consistency.  To put the corollary simply, "If anything can happen, who cares what does?"

    

     On some level, my feelings about this are a bit strong.  Years ago, back when I used to read comic books, I took an afternoon to study a multitude of the industry's stock and trade characters: heroes and villains.  This resulted in my making a list of all the characters whose special abilities made sense and a list of those whose didn't.  From that point on, I had a more deeply defined respect for the well-crafted characters and wished only for the demise of the stupid ones that had been created only for convenience.  Give your characters the time and attention they deserve.  Give them their depth and flesh.  You'll end up with something you and your readers are happier with.

     Oh, if you were in the right movie theater for the right showing of "X-Men 3: The Last Stand", yes, that was me cheering when Cyclops (Scott Summers) was killed.  As a character, he's a bit dull.  He has a cool superpower, but it's a stupid mutant power.  Unleashing devastating beams of concussive force from the eyes manifesting as a mutation in a single generation is ridiculous.  He might as well have sprouted big, white bird wings when he hit puberty.  Genetically, it lacks about as much sense.  Now you know.

I'm going to go grumble to myself some more about stupid comic book characters, but I'd love to hear about any that you'd like to grumble about.

Are there any characters who push your buttons by not being all they could be?