Monthly Archives: March 2015

The Shapes Roleplay Takes From Its Rules

Posted on by

DaveTrampierPlayersHandbook

 
I love roleplaying. There’s something very liberating about indulging in some mild escapism by jumping into the heart of another person to briefly write another life. It’s nestled somewhere between playing pretend, improvisational theatre, and gaming. I’d like to briefly explain how the mechanical framework for these games shape the stories they produce, specifically by contrasting free-form, chat-based play versus the more common tabletop varieties. When I was a teenager and younger adult, I roleplayed away a huge chunk of my free time in graphical MUDs (Multi-User Domains) like Furcadia or on internet relay chat groups. Eagerly looking for new experiences, I dipped in and out of tabletop roleplaying groups, but I was taken aback at how different the focus was. It wasn’t the mechanical underpinnings that pushed me away, it was how my previous stories about romance, poverty, family life, and skullduggery got replaced with punching goblins in the face. At the time I wrote it off as differing tastes, but now I understand that these characters and players were really just reconfiguring to fit into the mechanical systems of interest.

To give you an idea, my previous experience is generally classed as a variety of free-form roleplay, where players write segments either in real time or via a bulletin board, and players accept that the post exists within that fiction or is unacceptable and rejected. So the narrative that takes shape is a consensus one, and its incentive structure resembles the shape of a continually iterating Coordination Game…of sorts. A player may, in a vacuum, accept or reject any given segment unilaterally (or with agreement from others), but their positive cooperation and investment in the stories both by being accepting and presenting material that is interesting will likely please their partner and make their own segments more likely to be accepted.

All sorts of different incentives and relationships grow out of that game theory soil like a particularly stubborn weed. Generally it’s easier to be passive and get to know other players’ characters than it is to punch them in the mouth and take their things. In most tabletops, however, violence has a consistently predictable quality. People and creatures are rendered into numbers that quantify if one could or could not “take that guy”, and that psychic comfort of knowing “what should happen” pulls on motivations and incentivizes play towards Conan the Barbarian instead of Spice and Wolf.

The end result is that free-form stories are usually based on continued relationships, positive and negative, rather than overt violence. More interestingly, the interaction between characters and material things takes something of a weird left turn. There’s no reason why a player cannot be a king, a dock worker, a powerful demon, a serf; the system of consent dictates a player’s role in the community, so the traditional arc of accumulation of gold, experience, accolades, simply evaporates. The things that a character acquires or possesses are not about what they can let the player do anymore; they’re about what they mean to the character, the story, and the setting. It’s not: “What can this thing I’ve acquired allow me to fantasize?”, but instead: “What are the things worth fantasizing about?”

It gets more complicated, however, because unlike a tabletop, an online space can be subdivided with incredible ease, so what before would be three to five people cloistered around a single series of events, you now have tens of people bouncing against each other, with their own personal stories that intersect in these different spaces. Characters and players traverse room after room in a shared setting just as they would space, situating personal events in a perpetually changing context that’s unique to the perspective of each individual player. In a graphical MUD like Furcadia, the segmentation of space becomes an even finer gradient, as rooms are no longer discrete, and are maps instead, where one can only “hear”, or see posts from characters from the screen they currently inhabit. The twists and turns of a brief encounter aren’t from a humorous critical failure or heroic critical success, but from the strange misfortune of bumping into your worst enemy in a large, shared space where one was never guaranteed to cross paths ever again.

Serendipity is alive and well without dice in these systems, but the tensions surrounding fate are very different. When one plays with a more traditional game, the Dungeon/Game Master is constantly walking a thin line: making a more or less unilateral decision whether or not a rule or roll is going to be followed, in the interest of story-telling. In a free-form setting, there’s all sorts of crosswise motivations, the plot of a character, the immediate respect of your peers, the maintenance of a firmer canon, and so on. This reflexive, continual criticism and investigation means that players have to respect each other and their stories in order to continue or else be pushed out via slowly increasing social tension. When a player or DM gets out of hand at a tabletop, the entire campaign can simply explode, but a problematic player in a free-form group could be squeezed out to different areas to avoid certain players/characters/scenarios, or could be pushed out of the shared area altogether without so much as causing a wrinkle in the shared continuity.

In many ways my fundamental criticisms of mainstream roleplaying are essentially the same that I have for mainstream gaming: I think these games are a regurgitation of Capitalist ideology, and squeeze characters and stories through an arc of accumulation, and violent conflict when none of those qualities are a necessary element of character or story in other contexts. They have antagonism and violence as a fundamental assumption, and often enjoying them means an additional layer of strange, hierarchical consent above and beyond a mere suspension of disbelief. I did a quick summary of the characters I played over the past seven or so years, and I’m really unsure if their central dramatic conceits could exist in normal roleplaying frameworks, or would be improved by layering the core assumptions of tabletop roleplaying games on top of them.

Characterizing tabletops as only about slaying beasts and free-form to be heartfelt stories is disingenuous however, if only because I have skewed the data for my argument, which I will now rectify. Those involved in fantasy and sci-fi are probably well aware of Sturgeon’s law: “Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other art forms” As an addendum to this law, I’d like to posit that the constraints of any given genre or form have the most profound effect on the crap that forms the 90%. So it follows that since tabletops have violence and Capitalism baked in, and reproduce it, what kind of crap does free-form play generate?

The bottom of free-form play is a crust of barely literate, adolescent sex romps, to the point where some roleplaying services like F-List allow players to list their preferred sexual activities, and at the time of writing, only about 10% of its user base lingers in its non-sexual oriented areas. In an ideal world, free-form is an excellent vector for adult entertainment, but given the quality of both a lot of play being undertaken and the occasionally poisonous communities that exist…It ain’t perfect. Because space, sessions, and conversations can be so readily subdivided into every more private segments, these spaces breed play and players into remarkably unfiltered, queer dreamers.

At the outermost reaches of these spaces, the cis het male of mainstream media begins to look foreign and alien in an endless stream of octuple titted furries, Eldritch sex horrors, and confused Sonic remixes looking for edgeplay or fantastic scenarios of partners being swallowed whole by a urethra of a double-dicked Moloch. This regurgitation of pop culture mixed with the unfiltered sexual id of young adults could not exist nearly as easily in any other space, especially not in tabletop settings where one either needs to find or create rules to describe and constrain these characters and topics. In a free-form space, the only real barrier to finding the double-dicked Moloch of your dreams is to find another player who shares that particular kink.

This is the inevitable product of players exploring themselves and their desires in areas that are as public or private as they wish, and are respectfully constrained by their consent and the consent of their partners/other players. Through different forms, you see different faces of the same culture, and if one were to ask me what I saw in others through free-form roleplay, I’d say I saw a bunch of lonely perverts and socially maladjusted weirdos thirsty for physical and emotional connections, whether a simple hookup, or a shared dream that spanned years of time.

Free-form play naturally creates romances and intrigues while attracting the queer and the perverse specifically because of the mechanical vacuum that exists in that play style. The identities of characters, their desires, and their actions don’t have to be explained by a set of rules, and then mediated by a judge, so they spring outwards into all sorts of strange shapes to fill that void. It isn’t that any of these things couldn’t necessarily exist in a normative tabletop setup, it’s that the levers of power and of certainty, the things that players normally gravitate towards, are ineffectual in describing and mediating social interactions and identities. These mechanical levers, however, are astoundingly effective at describing violence and material accumulation in great detail, and bend players and their motivations towards those things as an end. It’s because of these distinctions in form that two different styles, sharing the same goal of fantasy escapism, can nevertheless create very different stories for very different people.

Prison and White People

Posted on by

This first ran on Splice Today.
_______

After the first season of Orange Is the New Black, some writers like Yasmin Nair criticized the show for its focus on, and subtle bias towards, white women, especially towards star Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling). The second season addresses these complaints head on. In episode eight, Piper gets a furlough to visit her dying grandmother, despite the fact that many other prisoners, mostly black, have been refused furloughs to see ill loved ones. Piper becomes the (understandable) target of much resentment, and after getting angrier and angrier, she stands up in the cafeteria, apologizes on behalf of white people everywhere, tells them that even though her grandmother is white, she still loves her, and encourages her tormentors to “shut the fuck up.” After which, Suzanne (Uzo Duba), on behalf of the other inmates and (presumably) the viewing audience, throws cake at this privileged, whiny little ass. End of moral.

But in the book on which the memoir is based, Piper didn’t actually get furlough. She asked to see her grandmother die, but the state said, “no.” Piper in real life certainly was middle-class, and privileged in many ways—not many ex-prisoners go on to write famous memoirs that get turned into hit TV series.  But the privilege presented on the show in episode eight, what she’s punished for, wasn’t actually a privilege she had. On the contrary, she was, in this matter, treated just like every other prisoner; with callous, bland disregard and petty authoritarian vindictiveness.

You could say that this doesn’t really matter; the dramatic point is that Piper is middle-class and white and is therefore better off than her cellmates. The incident in the cafeteria demonstrates that; why nitpick about details?

I think it’s worth nitpicking about details, though, because the moral here about Piper’s privilege is a little confused. Specifically, the show seems in many instances so eager to pull Piper down a peg, and to show that she’s privileged, that it can elide the fact that, white as she is, she’s in prison. Moreover, she’s in prison on a decade-old charge of having transported heroin. She committed a pretty low-level crime a while back, and so she’s taken away from her family and robbed of her freedom. She may be privileged in comparison to some of the people in prison with her, but compared to many viewers (and not just white ones) her life, as chronicled in the show, sucks.

This isn’t to say that race is irrelevant. But for the real Piper, racism did not allow her to go see her grandmother: racism prevented her from seeing her grandmother. Racism was used against her, not in the sense that she was discriminated against because she was white, but because the mechanisms and institutions built to police black people ended up policing her.

Racism against black people has been used as an excuse to target certain white people throughout the history of the U.S. White abolitionists who opposed slavery were subject to violence along with blacks in the Cincinnati riots of 1836. During Reconstruction, Northerners who supported black rights could be attacked and killed—The KKK killed white and black civil rights workers. Gone With the Wind gleefully recounts the murder of a Yankee official during Reconstruction who dared tell black people they could marry whites. For that matter, whites who did want to marry blacks, like Richard Loving, faced harassment and discrimination. Even beyond that, Ta-Nehisi Coates points out that politicians who’ve been associated with black causes, whether the Republican Party before the Civil War or the Democratic Party in more recent years, have been subject to racist attacks. As Coates says, “Abraham Lincoln’s light skin did not save him from a racist political attack, any more than it saved him from a racist assassination plot.”

Piper (in real life and in the TV show) wasn’t a civil rights worker or a political figure. But the fact remains that our prison system, the largest in the world, has been justified and sustained by a cultural commitment to policing people of color. As many historians have argued, the war on crime was inaugurated by politicians like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, who argued that civil rights demonstrations and movements were leading to a breakdown of law and order, the solution for which was more cops and more prisons. The result was an ongoing rhetoric of race-baiting around crime and imprisonment, exemplified by George H.W. Bush’s notorious 1988 Willie Horton ad. That rhetoric in turn fueled a 700 percent growth in prison population between 1970 and 2005.

In 2010 blacks were incarcerated at a rate of 2207 per 100,000 people and Latinos at the rate of 966 per 100,000, as opposed to only 380 per 100,000 for whites.

Nonetheless, there are still a lot of white people in prison: white males were 32.9 percent of the prison population in 2008, as opposed to 35.4 percent black males.  And a large number of those whites were in prison for the same reason as blacks—because America, in an excess of racial panic, has built a massive drug war and a massive prison system in an effort to police and control black people. America’s prison system disproportionately affects black people, through sentencing disparities for crack and other systemic biases. But the drug war machinery sometimes, almost incidentally, catches white people in its gears as well. The white rate of incarceration in the U.S., at 380 per 100,000, is still in the top 20 incarceration rates worldwide, and is twice as high as rates in England and Wales.

Since the moment it enshrined slavery in its Constitution, American authoritarianism has been built upon racism. Piper may be privileged in some ways, but at least for a while that racist authoritarianism has gotten her by the blonde locks as surely as it’s got her cellmates. Once you’ve built your prison, you can put anyone in it. Which is just one way that racism has made America less free, especially for black people, but not for them alone.
 

large_rsz_suzanne

Decoding Turing: Queer Superhero

Posted on by

2014, THE IMITATION GAME

 
Genre Conventions

Socially awkward, personally abrasive, math-obsessed, “agnostic about violence,” and gay—Alan Turing makes for an unlikely superhero. Yet the recent Oscar-winning film The Imitation Game gives us a biography largely assembled from tropes native to that genre: an origin story involving childhood trauma and the loss of loved ones, unusual gifts bringing extraordinary power, social persecution, and grave moral dilemmas.

Turing builds a “universal machine” — an “electrical brain” that “could solve any problem.” It was not just the largest or fastest or smartest computer, but the first — an entirely new kind of thing. The British military used the device to break the “unbreakable” code of the Nazi enigma machine. But that only created a new problem — how to use the intelligence they acquired. For the utility of breaking the code depended crucially on the Nazis never realizing that the code had been broken. Each time the Allies used the decrypted information to intervene militarily, they risked losing the advantage they had gained. Turing and his team used “Christopher” to decode the messages; then they had to calculate the odds and decide which Nazi attacks to thwart — and which to let go ahead: “Statistical analysis. The minimum number of acts it will take to win the war. The maximum before the Germans get suspicious.” Their intelligence made possible, among other things, the victory at Stalingrad and the invasion of Normandy; it is thought to have shortened the war by as much as two years. They saved millions of lives, and may have literally rescued the world from tyranny. But in the process, they deliberately allowed many thousands of people to die, soldiers and civilians.

The film rather overdramatizes this dilemma. Literally the first set of messages the excited cryptographers decipher concerns a u-boat attack, and as it happens, one young code-breaker has a brother serving aboard a targeted ship. Obviously the first impulse is to rush to save him, but Turing refuses. “Let the u-boats sink the convoy,” he advises. “Our job is not to save one convoy. Our job is to win the war. . . . Sometimes we can’t do what feels good. Sometimes you have to do what is logical.” With horror the rest of the group slowly realizes that he is right. The ships go down, the brother dies. The scene is meant, I think, to call into question to morality of the whole exercise. But it serves just as well as a justification. It is because they are willing to sacrifice their own loved ones that they have the right to sacrifice others. Their “blood-soaked calculus” allows for no special cases.

Turing makes sacrifices of his own, but of a different sort. Realizing that his engagement to fellow code-puzzler, Joan Clarke puts her at risk, he breaks it off. He begins, “You need to get far away from me” — but then, realizing that he cannot explain why without revealing MI-6 secrets and putting her at greater risk, he changes tack: “I don’t . . . care for you. I never did. I just needed you to break Enigma. I’ve done that now. So you can go.” The irony here is double: The engagement is a cover story, but he is covering for her (to maintain independence from her parents), not her for him (to hide his homosexuality). And second, it is precisely because he cares for her that he must leave her.

The scene mirrors the final and most heroic scene of the 2002 Spiderman film. Over the course of the movie, a lonely nerd, Peter Parker, becomes a wisecracking superhero, defeats the Green Goblin, and finally wins the love of “the girl next door, Mary Jane Watson — the woman I’ve loved since before I even liked girls.” But Parker is weighed down by guilt. He caused the death of his Uncle Ben by a sin of omission; he directly caused the death of his best friend’s father; and he has repeatedly put the people he loves — Mary Jane and Aunt May, in particular — in mortal danger. At the end, Mary Jane realizes that Peter is the “one man who’s always been there for me.” She confesses that she loves him.

The whole movie has built toward this point. We are told in the very first scene that “this, like any story worth telling, is all about a girl.” Peter has spent years vying for her attention, and now, at last, he has his chance.

“I will always be your friend. . . ,” he says. “That’s all I have to give.”

She cries, and he walks away.

It’s a bold way to end the film, the boy getting — but then not getting — the girl, choosing heroism over happiness. By the logic of Spiderman, Peter Parker did the right thing; in The Imitation Game, however, Turing does not come across so well. He seems, instead, unnecessarily, if also somewhat unconvincingly, cruel. Joan, who loves him, probably more than anyone else does, slaps him across the face and says, “You really are a monster.”

She is not alone in the assessment. Others call him “irascible,” “inhuman,” and “an arrogant bastard.” His young colleague, debating the fate of his doomed brother, demands: “Who the hell do you think you are? . . . You’re not God, Alan. You don’t get to decide who lives and who dies.”

“Yes, we do,” Turing replies. “No one else can.”

Later Turing recalls this exchange. “Was I God?” he asks. “No, because God didn’t win the war. We did.”

But what did they become by doing so? Turing offers his confession, and then poses the question to a police detective: “So tell me. What am I? Am I a machine? Am I a person? Am I a war hero? Am I a criminal?”

Like Frank Miller’s Commissioner Gordon 1 in The Dark Knight Returns, the policeman concludes: “I can’t judge you.”

“Well, then,” Turing sighs, disappointed and resigned, “You are no help to me at all.”

Stay Weird

The parallels to superhero stories are numerous and fairly apparent. Peter Parker and Batman have already been mentioned. And with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Alan Turing, comparisons to Sherlock Holmes are inevitable. The willingness to calculate odds and sacrifice thousands to save millions clearly echoes Ozymandias’ scheme in Watchmen — at a somewhat smaller scale, admittedly, but on the other hand, in the real world, so in that sense the stakes are infinitely higher. In fact, there is a bit of every obsessed, lonely scientist — from Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Doom — in the figure of Alan Turing. (In one scene he rants: “You will never understand the importance of what I have created here!”) And then there is the fact, sadly central to the story, that like Marvel’s mutants, Turing was a member of a persecuted minority.2

Of course it is extremely unlikely that those responsible for the film intended Turing’s story to echo Peter Parker’s, Adrien Veidt’s, or the Charles Xavier’s. And, given the late date of the de-classification of Turing’s war record, it is positively impossible that Stan Lee, Alan Moore, and company based their science hero fictions on Turing’s science hero reality.

But, while some of the similarities are superficial, others are surprisingly deep. Turing’s dilemmas, for example — accepting responsibilities that put loved ones at risk, or sacrificing many lives so that many others might live — are just the sort of decisions certain morally unlucky people have to make. In particular kinds of stories, such people may be heroes, but in others they are villains, and in some they are pitiable, tragic victims. However, the most important parallel, I think, between The Imitation Game and the superhero genre is in the treatment of difference. Each views difference as both a burden and a blessing, and celebrates as heroes those who use their gifts to serve, not merely themselves, but humanity more broadly — in other words, those who in expressing their difference also remind us of what we all share in common.

“No one normal could have done [what you did],” Joan tells Alan. “This morning I took a train though a city that wouldn’t exist were it not for you. . . . Do you wish you could have been normal? The world is an infinitely better place because you were not.”

Alan Turing was a homosexual at a time when homosexuality was not only disapproved of, but also a statutory offense. After the war, when his secret was discovered, he was fired from his job, disgraced in the papers. He was arrested, tried, and convicted of Gross Indecency — the same charge that sent Oscar Wilde to jail half a century before. Rather than go to prison, Turing agrees to a course of “hormonal therapy” — “Chemical castration to cure me of my homosexual predilections.” The film shows him shaking, stammering, losing focus. He was unable to complete a crossword puzzle, much less continue his work in mathematics. After a year of such treatment, he committed suicide.

The film suggests — or rather, it insists — that Turing’s homosexuality was specifically tied to his genius. His difference — sexually, socially, psychologically — is stressed throughout. He is unpopular at school, imperious with colleagues, insubordinate to his superiors. He does not especially like, or even care to understand, other people — and he does not care if they like or understand him. Others in society, such as bullying schoolmates and intruding policemen, treat his intellect as being suspicious in itself. (In fact, it was his intellect that leads to the discovery of his criminal sexuality. The police — responding to a burglary in which nothing was missing, and meeting there a Cambridge professor with a classified war record — initially suspect espionage.) But Turing is “an odd duck,” even when compared to his intellectual peers, and this oddness, this queerness, is what sets his thinking apart from theirs. He is maddeningly literal, unconcerned with convention, dismayed by social niceties. He is strange because he sees things differently, and it is that difference of perception that lets him attack unsolvable problems from new angles.3

Was that difference in perspective related to his sexuality, whether as cause or as consequence? We can’t say for certain, but surely it might have been. Turing, as the movie shows, developed his interest in codes at the same time that he discovered his attraction for other boys. And then, decades later, the effort to cure his homosexuality also robbed him of his genius.

The Imitation Game offers a moral, and to make sure we don’t miss it, we hear it three times, from three different characters. It supplies the last line of dialogue: “Sometimes it’s the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”

Of course Alan Turing was not a superhero, for the simple reason that there are no superheroes. (“Superheroes didn’t win the war. . . ,” he might say.) Turing was a real human being. Whatever The Imitation Game may have gotten wrong about him (and I am in no position to judge), it got at least this much right: The world was infinitely better because Alan Turing was not normal. And it cost him his life.
______

1.– In The Dark Knight Returns, Commissioner Gordon tries to explain his relationship to Batman by talking about Pearl Harbor: “A few years back, I was reading a news magazine — A lot of people with a lot of evidence said the Roosevelt knew Pearl was going to be attacked — and that he let it happen. . . . I couldn’t stop thinking how horrible that would be. . .and how Pearl was what got us off our duffs in time to stop the Axis. But
a lot of innocent men died. But we won the war. It bounced back andforth in my head until I realized I couldn’t judge it. It was too big. He was too big. . . .”

2.– Writing in the Hooded Utilitarian, Noah Berlatsky has noted that, in many of its particulars, the whole superhero concept is pretty gay: “To begin with, super-heroes generally have a secret life, a ‘secret identity,’ that they can’t talk about even to their closest friends and
relations. In other words, they are all closeted. And what’s in that closet? A hypermasculine, muscle-bound body, swathed in day-glo tights; an uber-manly man whose physical tussles with the bad guys preclude any meaningful relationship with the leading lady. Out of costume, on the other hand, the hero is a feminized sissy-boy, whose painful secret prevents him from having any meaningful relationship with the leading
lady. Either way, what looked like iconic maleness starts to look, from up close, rather queer. And that’s not even getting into the whole boy sidekick thing.”

3.– Turing tells his interrogator, “Of course machines can’t think as people do. A machine is different than a person. Of course it thinks differently.” But then, he notes, how astonishingly different people are
from each other, and concludes, rhetorically: “What’s the point of variation if not to say that we think differently?”

The Future Will Be Televised

Posted on by

Last week I suggested that a TV show about time travel didn’t have to be completely stupid. This week I want to suggest that it could also be entertaining. Here’s a script treatment for a pilot to such a would-be non-completely-stupid yet-potentially-entertaining series. Interested TV producers should mail stacks of 1960s-era $100 bills to my home address.

“Remote Control”

Zoom slowly out from historical footage of President Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 Address to Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”

2015:

Remy is the granddaughter of two scientists who worked for NASA in the early years of the space race. Both died before she was born, so she is surprised to receive a visit from Connor, a lawyer executing her grandmother’s secret will. To receive the money left to her, Remy has to fulfill one obligation: exhume her grandmother’s coffin and store it in her house for one year.

1961:

Lora, Remy’s grandmother, is leading a small group of politicians and military officers into an airport hanger, promising them that what they are about to see will change everything.

In a second location, scientists lean over a control board in hectic preparation. They include Art, the handsome if good-humoredly arrogant team leader, and Tom, a comparative wall-flower. (Either could be Remy’s future grandfather.)

Lora throws open the door to the hangar to reveal: an anti-climatically empty hanger. Or almost empty. She directs the men to a line of folding chairs situated in front of small crate, drops her purse, and picks up a phone hanging from a pillar: “We’re ready.”

Art is on the other end, and the control room bursts into activity.

In the hangar, all eyes are on the crate. The moment intensifies until . . . the crate is still just sitting there. The observers are getting impatient. Lora snaps at Art.

Tom just solved the problem–they’re connected.

Lora looks at the crate: still nothing. She’s about to speak when she hears a crash through the phone and then jerks around as the crate crashes open a second later. A very non-anthropomorphic robot breaks out: it rolls on multiple wheels, extends an array of praying mantis-like arms, and swivels a camera eye at the startled observers.

The control panel’s central video screen shows the observers as the scientists control the robot’s movements. Tom mumbles something about theatrics: there won’t be any crates to smash on the moon. Art agrees, but politicians like a good show; that’s why he put Lora on the main stage.

Lora introduces LURC-er 1, a remote controlled robot designed for lunar exploration. The president has promised the world America will be on the moon by the end of the decade—which is impossible. How do you build a life-sustaining environment strong enough to withstand outer space and then make it lightweight enough to be rocketed out of the Earth’s gravity while still carrying enough food, water, and oxygen to keep even one human being alive? This will not happen in our lifetime’s or even our grandchildren’s lifetimes. But rocketing a robot to the moon is comparatively simple. LURC-er 1 rolls forward.

2015:

Remy and Connor watch as the coffin is dug up. When they open it, both are relieved to find not a desiccated corpse but a male mannequin dressed in a 60s-era business suit.

It and the coffin are trucked to Remy’s house and left in her empty garage.  Connor says he will have to check in occasionally to confirm that the coffin remains in the house. The terms of the will are vague on this point, and he’s hinting that he might like to stop by more often than legally required. There’s some definite mutual attraction here.

1961:

Lora bounds into the control with the news: the observers were impressed, and project funding is guaranteed. Applause and celebration—including a lingering hug from Art. Tom looks away: “We still haven’t figured out the time delay.” This draws Lora’s attention away from Art. She could have sworn she heard the crate shattering through the control room speakers before it shattered in the hangar—but of course that’s impossible, and she laughs it off. Tom looks shocked. He mumbles something and starts poking at the controls. Art ignores him and draws Lora to an adjourning room where once alone they kiss.

2015:

Remy is woken by a faint noise downstairs. She finds her phone, preps it to dial 911, and arranges her keys in her other fist so they protrude as weapons. She turns on lights as she investigates the house, but finds nothing. Before giving up and going back upstairs, she checks the door to the garage: it’s unlocked. She opens it and hits the light but nothing has changed; the coffin is still sitting in the middle of the empty garage. She almost leaves but then walks to the coffin. She opens the lid: the mannequin is gone.

1961:

At night, Art is walking Lora to her car where they say goodnight with another kiss. Once inside she realizes she doesn’t have her keys—which are in her purse.

Lora enters the hangar where she left her purse earlier. She finds it and then hears a noise from one of the darkened areas. She notices that the folding chairs and broken crate haven’t moved—but the robot is gone. She explores and soon comes face to camera-eye with LURCer 1. It reaches a claw slowly toward her. She wants to smile, but can’t: “Art? Is that you?” The robot shakes its camera head “No.”

2015:

Connor wakes up to his phone ringing. It’s Remy explaining that the mannequin is gone and accusing him of playing some kind of game with her. Connor swears he knows nothing.

Remy hangs up angry. She is standing in her kitchen now when she hears something loud from upstairs. She dials 911 and reports an intruder in her house. She grabs her keys again and shouts warning that the police are coming as she walks upstairs. She sees a figure in a darkened corner. She throws on a light ready to punch, but it’s just the lifeless mannequin posed in a standing position. She approaches it cautiously. It remains frozen. She leans closer until her face is inches from it. A tense pause. Nothing happens.

1961:

The next morning, Lora, Tom and Art are back to work in the control room. Lora asks who was operating with LURCer last night, but they both deny it, and the panel recorded no activity. Tom is smiling though. He sits at the controls, saying he thinks he’s figured out the time delay. He activates LURCer and the screen shows the folding chairs and broken crate in the hangar. Why is it so dark? And where is everyone? Art is on the phone to the crew stationed in the hangar.

In the hangar, the crew is positioning the dormant LURCer; the crate and chairs are gone.

Art thinks Tom must have rolled the robot into the wrong area of the hangar somehow, but exploring reveals nothing. Lora’s face changes as she recognizes what is happening. She tells Tom to turn around—to turn LURCer around. When he does, Lora is looking back at them through the video screen. Are they watching a tape? The panel registers a live feed. Lora leans closer to the panel and speaks in sync with her lips moving silently on the screen: “Art? Is that you?” Tom looks at her, then operates LURCer: her image moves left and right as he shakes the camera “No.”

2015:

A police officer has finished taking Remy’s statement as two others report that the house and grounds are clear. Connor arrives, upset and apologizing. He explains that he is only following directives sent to him by an anonymous client. The police offer to remove the mannequin, but discover it’s surprisingly heavy. It topples rigidly onto its back on the upstairs landing. Remy tells them to leave it, and the officer assures her they will be patrolling all night and to call for any reason. Remy throws Connor out too, but first he gives her an envelope: the first payment, pre-sealed by the employer. She rips it open and stacks of $100 bills spill out. Remy watches at the window as Connor and the last police car pull away. She’s holding the bills and notices that they look unused but the design is wrong; they’re from the 1960s. A hand grabs her arm. She spins as a speaker behind the mannequin’s motionless lips says, “Remy, it’s me.”

1961:

Lora, Tom and Art are alone in the hangar with LURCer. Art has sent everyone else home. He checks that the door is locked, before Tom explains. The “delay” was due to the system he invented to synchronize signals between the control room and LURCer.  It was just supposed to solve a technical issue, but the adjustment he made this morning proves that the signals traveled back and forth from a point in the past. He just invented time travel.

Although Tom has overthrown all of physics, Art points out that the technology has no practical application. They built LURCer two months ago, and so that’s as far back as they can send signals.  Lora disagrees. Can’t the signals move forward in time? Isn’t that how she heard the crate break? The signals were traveling one second into the future. Why not send them further? How far is the range? It would only be possible if LURCer is maintained in the future too, either by their future selves or someone else. They leave the hangar, ready to find out.

2015:

Remy backs away from the mannequin. “What’s wrong?” it asks. She tells it take off its mask so she can see his face. “You know this isn’t a mask.” Remy flees as it moves toward her and then suddenly stops. “Oh,” it says and turns and vanishes into the kitchen. Remy waits, bewildered, then tentatively follows. She turns the corner to see it studying her wall calendar. It reads the date aloud and then looks at her. It says the date again. She nods. She flinches as it moves toward her again, but then it walks past her and heads upstairs. She follows it to her study where it is writing on a piece of paper at her desk. It seals the sheet into an envelope and hands it to her. “Hide this in one of your books.” It points at the wall of bookcases and then starts downstairs again. “What is it?”“The password. Have you called Connor yet?” “Password to what?” “I’m going back to the coffin now.” Remy leans over the banister as it descends. “Why do you want me to call Connor?” It pauses at the bottom. “And, Remy, remember.” It looks expressionlessly up at her. “Don’t trust me.” It vanishes around the corner.

1961:

Lora, Art and Tom sit at the control panel. They have no way to calibrate time distance, so Tom takes a guess—somewhere between a few seconds and a few millennia. To their shock, the signal is received. They’re connected. But the screen is black. Stranger, the new input doesn’t match their equipment—way more data than they can process. And the motor controls aren’t right either. They can’t get the wheels to engage properly. What has happened to LURCer?

2015:

Connor pulls up in front of Remy’s house and runs up the steps. She is waiting at the door: “Who are you working for?” He swears he doesn’t know and explains how his client handled everything through the mail. He never met or even spoke to anyone. Remy eventually accepts he’s telling the truth and starts to shut the door—when Connor asks if anything else happened. Did the intruder come back? Remy doesn’t answer, but clearly it has. He asks to come out, to stay somewhere else tonight, at a hotel—but then Remy opens the door and invites him. “You need to see this.”

1961:

They give up trying to work the motor controls. Did someone redesign LURCer? If so, at least the data they’re receiving will provide schematics for them to match the upgrade. The screen suddenly brightens as a lid lifts. Two faces look down at the camera. It’s Remy and Tom. “Who the hell are they?”

2015:

Remy and Tom hear noises as they approach the garage. As they enter, the coffin is jerking spastically, then stops. It jerks once more, then stops again.  After a nervous moment, they open the lid and look down at the mannequin’s face.

1961:

Remy and Connor vanish as the screen goes dead. The signal has cut off.

In the hanger, LURCer comes alive and starts rolling outside.

They try reconnecting, but it’s as if the future LURCer is gone, or is being blocked, like a busy signal.

LURCer enters their building.

They continue trying controls and debating what just happened—when LURCer bursts into the control room. They step back. Who’s controlling it? It rolls toward them. Then stops. One of its arms extends to the floor and begins to scratch. Lora approaches—Art tries to hold her back—but she shrugs him off and kneels to study the scratches. They’re Morse code. “H-E-L-P.” One of the other arms has begun scratching and Tom reads it: “M-E.” Art reads the third arm: “K-I-L-L.” And Lora moves to read the fourth: “P-O-T-I-S.” What is Potis? Lora looks into the robot’s camera. “You want us to help you kill the President of the United States?” All the arms begin scratching again. They each read a letter: “Y” “E” “S.” They stand back as the arms keep scratching and scratching the same word over and over: YES YES YES YES YES

End on a slow zoom into historical footage of Kennedy’s Address to Congress: “Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.”

kennedy

The Unwitting Supremacist

Posted on by

With friends like these, who needs enemies? Last week, outspoken proponent of diversity Heidi MacDonald used her platform to belittle and mock some of the biggest meanest bullies in comics: people who want to talk about racism.

How much do you know about the Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club (MSBC) controversy? If it’s nothing, congratulations on living your best life; you can, if you want, catch up on it here. (We’ll wait.) If you are familiar with MSBC, please set aside for the moment your take. One of the few undisputed facts of the whole debacle is that its creators decided not to make their comic anymore. The impetus of MacDonald’s post, as she describes it, was to use her capacity “as a reporter to investigate if their decision was justified.” Well, stop the press, Vicki Vale. Their decision was entirely within their rights as creators, and is therefore justified no matter what you or me or anyone else thinks about it.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I have a lot of opinions on both the comic (which doesn’t strike me as cultural appropriation) and the creators’ decision to quit (which I find ridiculous). But those are not journalism. MacDonald’s post is what is known as a hot take, and it is made up of her total misunderstanding of both cultural appropriation as a concept and one person’s blog post that went up after the comic was cancelled. Along the way, she asserts that manga appropriated Walt Disney(?) and Robert Louis Stevenson(??), and accuses Jem Yoshioka, the aforementioned blogger, who is of Japanese descent, of being dismissive of Japanese culture. Whatever you might think about all that, it sure as shit isn’t reporting. The fact that the author sees it as such comports neatly with her central claim, which is that champion of equality Heidi MacDonald knows racism, and this ain’t it.

*  *  *

Anyone can have an opinion. But it’s inappropriate to position yourself as a cheerleader for people from one or more demographics to which you don’t belong, disparage their opinions, displace them with your own, and then act as if you’re doing them a favor. If you do so in your capacity as editor, it is not just distasteful; it is an abuse of power. It is being a fucking bully.

While there are many examples of this behavior in comics, let’s zoom in on a case study from the world of High Literature. If you can even bear to get pulled into another insider-y saga, I’d like to share an illustrious tale about Times Literary Supplement editor Toby Lichtig. About two weeks ago, the Los Angeles Review of Books ran his remarkable essay on gender inequity in the literary magazine milieu. Lichtig wrote with great news for me and my fellow women writers: he has thought deeply about our struggle, and he wants us to know it’s going great.

lichtig

Hey girl. Just want u to know ur doing great. xo, Toby

Lichtig’s essay, like MacDonald’s post, is inside baseball at its worst. It is, variously, a takedown of a takedown of the London Review of Books; a piece that somehow both denies and accounts for the lack of women in literary criticism; and a wrongheaded critique of one frustrated woman writer, Katherine Angel, and her ilk for writing “casually” about gender (which I guess is what passes for a sick burn in British English). Despite its casualness, Lichtig frames Angel’s writing as a violent attack:

I’d like to make a small case for the magazine at which I work—the Times Literary Supplement—one of the publications so casually attacked by Angel as bastions of androcentricity. I say “casually” because Angel’s main focus of attack was the LRB, and she only offered a sideswipe at the TLS. And I also say “casually” because some of her writing on the subject was indeed casual. (emphasis mine)

Lichtig’s essay also describes a “sort of ‘blah’ that habitually creeps into writing about” gender inequity. By “blah” he means unfair generalizations, which he perceives Angel’s essay and just in general (lol). In the spirit of specificity, Lichtig waxes on about how each and every literary magazine is a super special snowflake (…sound familiar yet?). He takes a close look at numbers that aren’t really so different from one another. He even explains how statistics could never truly account for the True Celebration of Womanhood that was TLS’s recent Susan Sontag issue. Or something?

TL;DR: NOT ALL MEN. But reaching past the essay’s fundamental pettiness, it is a fascinating cultural document. In Lichtig, we have an associate editor of a magazine who elected himself to speak not just on behalf of that publication, but for the experience of all women in the literary world. Standing behind him, we have his employer, the Times Literary Supplement, which (presumably) thought that having him speak in this way sounded like a good idea. And finally there’s the LARB, the publication that deemed it fit to print. The final product is some 4,000 words of egregious mansplaining implicitly endorsed by one of the most reputable literary publications in the world.

It is important to realize that the struggle of women writers is not Lichtig’s real subject. His subject is his misguided opinion on the struggle of women writers, and in disguising that as objective truth he is not altogether artless. His opening paragraphs are a master class in how to put a woman’s exact words into scare quotes. And there is real rhetorical sophistication in his invocation of feminist icon Mary Beard, his TLS colleague, whom he quotes twice. In the world of Lichtig’s essay, it is only women—including Katherine Angel, LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, novelist Kathryn Heyman (whose name Lichtig misspells twice), and Beard herself—who commit acts of sexism against other women. Kind of like saying that someone of Japanese descent is being dismissive of Japanese culture, if you can see where I’m going with this.

What’s really galling about the essay is not Lichtig’s tactics (gross as they are) or his ideas (which are really nothing new), but the patronizing way in which he positions himself as a cheerleader for women in the literary world even as he discounts their experience and opinions:

Portraying the situation as intractable and representing the literary world as a male-dominated monolith against which women can only bang their heads or give up can be counterproductive, leading not to resistance but resignation. Rather than argue that literary editors are “perpetuating” gender disparity, better to look at the historical facts: we have made great progress in redressing “the shocking paucity of women of authority and expertise” in most areas of our culture over the past 200 years, and we should rededicate ourselves to continuing that progress, rather than blaming literary publications for slowing it down.

These words speak to me, not with the message they’re meant to convey, but as an artifact of the time in which I write. Lichtig’s paternalistic pep talk, his complete mischaracterization of another thoughtful essay (on which his own is supposedly based), his half-baked historicism, and his self-congratulation are all too familiar. I see it all the time in comics. (Shoutout to The Comics Journal!) Today, I happen to be talking about The Beat.

*  *  *

Call them the unwitting supremacists. “Awareness” will always and forever pour forth from the mouths of well-meaning people like Toby Lichtig and Heidi MacDonald. But the inequities they seek to redress by definition demand their thoughts should count less. They require fewer proclamations of “awareness” and more ongoing, concrete editorial action and opportunities to cede the floor to other voices.

Lichtig, for one, could GAF about voices. Wearing the mantle of editorial authority, he only seeks to ease our worried minds. “We [editors] notice the gender divide,” he writes. “We think and talk about it regularly. And it is, I think, this awareness that is key to things changing.”

Reader, I humbly submit to you, here towards the end of an essay that has long since surpassed take-level meta, that awareness is not the key to change. Awareness is an abstraction, or worse, an illusion. Sometimes, as in MacDonald’s piece, awareness is wielded as both a talisman and a weapon—and then it’s closer to a lie. I guess it’d be one thing if it only powered bloated blog posts and ill-considered essays, but the sad historical fact is that it permeates everything from editorial policies to dismissive emails and tweets—all manner of communiqués, public and private, from people with cultural capital who earnestly believe themselves to be proponents of change. It is, to use Lichtig’s word, casual sexism and racism, and it is often culturally and institutionally supported, if not explicitly endorsed.

Back to MacDonald’s post. “If you have been reading my writings for any amount of time, you know that I’m a fan of multicultural diversity, and of multiple viewpoints and creators of every sex, religion, creed, race and sexual orientation getting a chance to tell their stories,” she writes. “I’m also a huge fan of cultural context for stories that examine how the preconceptions of a work of art are reflected in the execution. But I never want to see these criticisms used to PROACTIVELY SILENCE ART.”

Those capital letters are the author’s, and they are used throughout her screed, along with boldface and incredulous subheadings, to convey her utter indignation that people started a conversation about cultural appropriation in some comic she has officially deemed OK. Like Lichtig, MacDonald frequently describes critique as violent attack. She casts critics of MSBC as enemies of good art and bullies who “silenced” its creators. And even as she ascribes to them this incredible power, she mocks them as overly sensitive, irrational people whose claims are no more than “hurt feelings.” This rhetorical hypocrisy will sound familiar to anyone who has a passing familiarity with indie comics criticism. Political correctness is killing comics, or so they say. What it amounts to is a bunch of hubbub that sounds like it’s supporting diversity, but works diligently to protect the status quo. And what is getting lost—and, worse, derided—are the actual voices that were marginalized in the first place.

What is silencing? A lot of people in comics seem confused, so let me be plain: silencing is using your platform to punch down. It involves, in MacDonald’s post as in posts at other prominent comics sites, characterizing conversations about racism (or any given -ism or phobia) as censorship and/or irrational bullying. When someone called bullshit on MacDonald’s post, she said, “We need to do better. If we want to fight the cultural ascendance of ONE viewpoint—the white male cis viewpoint—we can’t let weak arguments define our position.” Then MacDonald said, to another person, “I am an equal opportunity jerk.”

Her language is reminiscent of every comics asshole ever who has refused to examine their own bias. The difference is that MacDonald thinks she’s doing it in the name of diversity—which is, I think, worse. It’s no accident that equal-opportunity offenders always ALWAYS offend certain people. When those people try to then explain where they are coming from, that is not attacking or policing comics. It is straight-up self-defense.

Anyone who has tried to follow the MSBC controversy as it has unfolded knows how difficult it is to see past mainstream coverage on The Beat and Bleeding Cool. To wade through the primary sources is a ridiculous exercise that’s emblematic of the dearth of prominent platforms available to divergent perspectives. Gatekeepers like MacDonald are not yet convinced of those critics’ humanity, instead casting them as anon trolls, proponents of callout culture, or bullies who aren’t even personally invested in comics.

MacDonald got some blowback for her piece, which she acknowledged in an addendum to her post that reaffirms her own imagined cultural awareness. (Har har.) Meanwhile, Jem Yoshioka, the blogger MacDonald mocked and diminished—and whose post, whether or not you agree with it, was respectful, thoughtful, and kind—has received at least one death threat from GamerGate. Such are the stakes of trying to carve out a place for yourself to exist in this crazy world: you’re threatened with extinction, or else laughed at even as you’re imbued with the magical power to kill comics with your thoughts. This milieu is unacceptable and depressing, but not hopeless. One thing I know: downstream voices on Twitter, Tumblr and elsewhere are punching up and speaking out. It won’t always have to be for survival. Someday it will feel like victory.

Voices from the Archive: Caroline Small on Female Comics Creators

Posted on by

As I mentioned yesterday, Kelly Thompson is running a poll to make a list of the best female comics creators. I thought I’d reproduce one of Caroline Small’s comments on this topic from some time back. She’s responding to the late Kim Thompson. (The back and forth was actually on another site…click through to the thread if you want all the ins and outs.)

I’m guessing nobody’s still reading this thread but I’m going to do something contrarian and agree with Kim — although for reasons he might not like. I think he’s absolutely correct that any discussion like this is problematic without some discussion of the values that make work “great.” But to me, the reason that is so important is because, if the history of women’s writing is any comparison, the work of women cartoonists, considered altogether and on its own terms, without reference to the historical criteria used to evaluate (mostly male) cartoonists, may in fact challenge the assumptions and criteria that we use to evaluate the work that’s been done so far.

I’m a known partisan for Anke Feuchtenberger’s marvelous work. Having recently been introduced to Charlotte Salomon’s work I anticipate a similar feeling to emerge.

But a lot of people say artists like Feuchtenberger and Salomon are not “cartoonists” because they don’t work in quite the same aesthetic tradition as the ones in your list, Kim — even though Feuchtenberger at least describes herself as a cartoonist. When I start from their work as my aesthetic benchmark, more women emerge: Ana Hatherly, Elisa Galvez, Dominique Goblet.

The aesthetic tradition of “classical cartooning” (?) unfortunately hasn’t coincided historically with a very welcoming environment for women, one where we have lots of role models and fellow travelers to smooth the path, to provide encouragement and motivation and inspiration, and to create a sense of shared voice. That’s why I’m resistant to the 60-year metric. It doesn’t let the best work by women who have come of age after the advances of recent decades — advances Fantagraphics was part of — come to the surface for critical examination. I think if we limit ourselves to that historical precedent, we can’t, say, evaluate the work of innovative cartoonists like Cathy Malkusian or Lauren Weinstein in the context established by cartoonists like Feuchtenberger and Salomon. And I think reading them that way, instead of against, say, Herge or Herriman, leads to fascinating insights about the cartooning aesthetic and its possibilities — the comparison made me like Malkusian and Weinstein’s work much more than I did before I approached in from that perspective. It remains an open question what such comparisons would yield for reading Alison Bechdel or Lynda Barry or other women who work in the more traditional cartooning aesthetic.

Maybe it will in fact be 60 years before we can accurately say who the greatest women cartoonists will be, but I don’t think we should be afraid of recognizing and celebrating the work of women cartoonists as “great” until that time has passed. That’s largely abdicating any role that critics and criticism can play in making the environment of cartooning in the broad sense more nourishing for women cartoonists. If we need to codify and celebrate and advocate a separate tradition of “women’s cartooning” with its own aesthetic and cultural criteria in order to be able to roar these women’s names as greats in comics, then so be it. I think Herriman can stand the competition. Maybe we need another word for “comics artist” than just “cartoonist.” But what I think is sexist is the demand that women work in that tradition and only that tradition in order to be considered great.

 

9783931377861

Utilitarian Review 3/7/15

Posted on by

Wonder Woman News

I’m reading Wednesday, March 11, at 6:30 in Chicago at 57th Street Books.

I’m reading Saturday, March 14 from 4-5:30 at the Urbana Free Library down in Urbana, IL.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Ilana Gershon on policing teachers on social media.

On how the Batman TV show never goes bad.

I compiled a list of my writing about misandry.

Adrian Bonenberger on Bill O’Reilly and why we like some liars and not others.

Tracy Q. Loxley compares Iggy Azalea and Vanilla Ice.

Donovan Grant on the new Captain America and the dream of a black superhero who doesn’t suck.

Chris Gavaler tells “12 Monkeys” how to fix their Time Machine.

Kristian Williams on John Constantine and the art of magic (and/or the magic of art.)
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Reason I wrote about the Homan Square black site and the history of police torture in Chicago.

At Ravishly I wrote about:

— Spock’s sex appeal and the downsides of Vulcan masculinity.

—Michelle Rodriguez, whiteness, and superheroes.

—why superheroes of all sizes are better.

—call-out culture, and how critics of it seem to assume that twitter is a left space (it isn’t.)

At Splice Today I reviewed a bunch of awesome metal albums.

At the Reader:

—I wrote about a nifty anniversary show at the Smart Gallery

— I reviewed D&D prog metal band Elder
 
Other Links

Russ Smith on how David Brooks is still awful.

You can buy a book for an incarcerated child.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Ferguson report and America’s history of stealing stuff from black people.

Aaron Bady on American academia’s ignorance of African literature.

Interesting piece on booking women authors on television talk shows.
 

john-constantine