#60s lesbians my beloved... KILLS EVERYONE

[fru1tt0ast]

hey tumnlt dot com.. 😝😝😝 the spy pou disease is progressing... i had to draw her... i HAD TO 💥💥💥 i'll draw crowley as more than stupid mwah mwah smooch next time... i just had to get this mf out of my brain because otherwise something catastrophic would happen (i would turn into her and the world would explode from my swagtacularnes)

there's two versions bc one of them i put the lesbian flag as an overlay

and also ive still not watched season two yet still because i'm finishing dexter (my beloathed) (i hate that show so much) so pls no spoilers...

[scientia-rex]

For the most part, my approach to prescribing hormones is “sure,” but I will note that the one thing I lean HARD on patients about is smoking. If you’re transgender, and you’re on hormones, the number one thing we want to protect is your cardiovascular health. That’s frankly the number one thing I want to protect in all my patients, but anyone taking exogenous hormones is at higher baseline risk. And the best thing you can do for your heart is DON’T SMOKE. It’s a bitch to quit, and I didn’t even smoke much or long before I quit in my late teens, and I STILL didn’t enjoy quitting and had smoking dreams for years. It’s harder to quit than just about anything else up to and including crack and heroin, and that’s coming from a patient of mine who recently passed in her early 60s who’d done all of those things—for years and years—but eventually was able to quit everything except smoking. And that killed her. She developed severe COPD and eventually called to say her blood oxygen saturation was dipping into the 70s, which is incompatible with life. She was lucid enough to decline medical care, including refusing to call 911 or go to the ER. A week later, after both I and one of our outreach nurses had contacted her to ask her to please go to the ER, I got a notification that she’d been found dead. She had been so frustrated that she wasn’t a candidate for a lung transplant.

One of my oldest trans patients is in her late 50s. She’s had blood clots that went to the lungs. Repeatedly. Smoking raises that risk. Estrogen raises that risk. She’s a veteran with PTSD; of course she smoked.

These aren’t theoretical. These are humans I’ve cared for over years of their lives. I have been rooting for them—my beloved former addict, who spoke without shame about her years of homelessness and drug use in the city; my queer elders, who are slowly trading in their motorcycles for power scooters. I want everyone to live their fullest, best life.

Smoking doesn’t fit into that. Please don’t smoke. I don’t want you to die like that—not now and not later. I want you to have the future that you may not be able to see yet, but exists.

Since I moved home as an out queer, word got out, and there’s a whole apartment complex of lesbians in their 60s to their 80s who come see me—sitting next to their wives in the office, nagging about blood pressure meds, tattling about not having gotten the shingles shot they said they would. To be clear, when I was growing up in town, I knew no lesbians. Not one. I knew one gay kid in my class, which eventually turned into two. We were it. To see these women living decades with their wives and being able to squabble like any couple in my office over who was supposed to bring their home blood pressure cuff in for us to check it… it means the world to me.

[elizadoolittlethings]

https://www.room207press.com/2018/01/we-dont-go-back-76-league-of-gentlemen.html

Friday, 19 January 2018

We Don't Go Back #76: The League of Gentlemen (1999-2017)

When

The League of Gentlemen

was first broadcast, I didn't own a TV, and by the time I owned one, I was living with my Beloved, who didn't have any interest in seeing it. Nonetheless, I could tell you a not insignificant amount about the major characters, and reel off catchphrases. I could tell you what it was like. People cared about it. Partly this was because several of my friends adored it, and it entered the referential lexicon of our conversation. But partly it seemed to be present, part of the furniture of our pop culture.

For example, I remember that at the time the university LGB society (the T or the Q were not yet added, which is related to a point I'll pick up later) used pictures of prominent gay and lesbian people on posters for an anti-homophobia campaign and one of them was Mark Gatiss, and I recognised him as the chap from

The League of Gentlemen

. It's fair to say that

The League of Gentlemen

fell firmly into the category of things I'd never seen but which I could take part in a conversation about without getting completely lost.

I never got round to watching

The League of Gentlemen

.

But now this project is Serious Business, there are some things I can't really get away with leaving out. So I committed myself to watching it. A good friend expressed concern that it might be too late for me to do that. I sort of half understood what he was getting at, but only really got what he was about having worked through it.

The usual caveats about how writing about comedy are the antithesis of funny apply here, by the way (I still think my funniest article was the one about

Planet of the Apes

, but I digress).

Honest town signs.

The League of Gentlemen

are Reese Shearsmith, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson. All four of them write; Gatiss, Pemberton and Shearsmith appear in front of the camera and divide the vast majority of characters, men and women, between them.

It's set in and around the fictional village of Royston Vasey ("You'll never leave!"), in the North of England, where everyone is a grotesque. It's sort of but not entirely sketch comedy.

Some characters appear in most of the episodes: Pauline (Pemberton), who runs a job start course, loves pens and despises the unemployed; Mike (Pemberton), Barry (Gatiss) and their spectacularly messed up mate Geoff (Shearsmith); disappointed musician Les McQueen (Gatiss); Mr Chinnery the vet (Gatiss again), who kills every animal he touches; Hilary Briss the butcher (also Gatiss) who puts something terrible and evil in his delicious sausages; and perhaps the most iconic characters in the show, Edward and Tubbs (Shearsmith and Pemberton), a pair of debased, depraved yokels who run a Local Shop for Local People and who visit unspeakable fates on anyone who comes who isn't Local.

What's all this SHOUTING?

But unlike many sketch shows, the recurring characters' stories progress from episode to episode. So for example, the fate of innocent Benjamin (Shearsmith) at the hands of his finicky aunt Val (Gatiss) and monstrous uncle Harvey (Pemberton) develops and escalates as he realises he might never be able to leave, and begins to formulate a plan of escape. Pauline finds her nemesis in one of her course attendees. Mr Briss's Special Stuff creates an epidemic of nosebleeds.

Many characters appear in no more than a handful of episodes at most, and become the focus of the episodes they're in. The Legz Akimbo theatre company (slogan: "put yourself in a child!") come to visit the local school but their internal tensions destroy the group. A guide leads a party of tourists through the Royston Vasey caves, while replaying a terrible tragedy for which he blames himself. A farmer keeps a man who slept with his wife as a scarecrow in his field. Kenny Harris (Gatiss), owner of the Dog Cinema, engages in a cutthroat business struggle with a rival who's more into cat films.

And then there's Papa Lazarou.

HELLO, DAVE!

Papa Lazarou (Shearsmith) is the single most nightmarish creation of the League of Gentlemen, and along with Tubbs and Edward, is most representative of the show's folk horror elements. He's the owner of the Pandemonium Carnival, which comes to town early in series 2. Papa Lazarou is a nightmare in human form, his scabrous face caked in black-and-white minstrel makeup. He forces his way into people's houses, insisting on calling them "Dave", and intimidating them through an almost supernatural power of domination into giving him their wedding ring, wherein he spirits them away as his slaves, with the phrase, "You're my wife now."

He is genuinely terrifying, and I wonder how that first episode he's in would play if it didn't have a laugh track (only the first two seasons have laugh tracks). And of course he's one of the two places where people most take offence at

The League of Gentlemen.

The most usual objection to Papa Lazarou is that he's in minstrel blackface. But while minstrel makeup is a blot on our culture, it is, it's obvious from the way that Papa Lazarou is framed is that he's supposed to be horrific because he's precisely the sort of person who wears blackface and always wears it.

In his second appearance (the final episode of series 3) there's an insane visual gag revolving around him disguising himself as relatively normal by painting a pale skin tone

over

his blackface makeup, which I found hilarious. But it's also a bit of a problem for a lot of viewers, evidently, because I've read at least two pieces online that interpret the scene as meaning that he's naturally minstrel-toned, which is... Well, I don't know. I'm starting to doubt my own reading a bit, but part of Papa Lazarou's grotesquerie is that you can see how the black and white paint is caked on his face in closeup, and I'm sort of inclined to go with my original reading, partly because it's much less hard to swallow, and mostly because it's a lot funnier.

The League of Gentlemen

is part of a tradition of British comedy and horror alike that deals with grotesque figres: in a show with Geoff, Mr Briss, Pauline, Harvey and, oh God, Edward and Tubbs, Papa Lazarou is just one more of a parade of freaks and monsters. And he is scary, really scary. The episode where Papa Lazarou and his Pandemonium Carnival comes to town (season 2, episode 1) is the point where I moved from a state of "that bit was pretty good" ambivalence to understanding why people consider

The League of Gentlemen

to be an undisputed classic of British TV comedy. Whatever the framing of Papa Lazarou and his freakshow (and notwithstanding the arguments about whether anyone should be making gags about blackface at all, the politics of freakshows is a subject I am simply not equipped to get into), that whole episode is a delirious comic horror and I have seen little to match it.

I can't go to Dorothy Perkins.

The other point where

The League of Gentlemen

gets some flak is in the figure of Babs the transgender cabbie. And the joke with Babs is partly that she's butch and hairy, so that she looks like a bloke in drag (specifically that she resembles the other women characters on the show, only more so), and partly that she's excessively forthcoming about the mechanical details of her transition with her clients. It's complicated by the fact that most of the people of Royston Vasey like her and are supportive of her. No one on the show is ever an open bigot about Babs. She's never deadnamed, for instance. And she's essentially one of the most sympathetic characters in the show. But nonetheless she embodies most of the most enduring transphobic stereotypes, simply by being so grotesque (so much so that we never see her face).

And back in 1999, as I mentioned in passing, we still talked about LGB issues and a lot of us hadn't added the T yet. And it's not as if trans people hadn't been there all along, but trans rights are in the general sphere of discourse now in a way that in the UK they weren't in the 90s. And this doesn't mean that a character like Babs isn't a problem, it means that many of the people who might be aware of the problem now weren't then because it hadn't been pointed out to them. And that isn't an excuse either. It's like all the history that comes back, unresolved, to haunt us.

You could tell that it haunted

The League of Gentlemen

: in the special episodes that aired over the 2017 Christmas season, she's back. She has to be, really: in a lot of ways, Babs acts like a Greek chorus for the unfolding story. So here she is, opening proceedings as ever. Barbara has transitioned successfully now, and she even says that trans people should not be "a source of cheap laughs" just for being who they are, and given that Barbara is a character who has always been framed as having her heart in the right place, as someone you're supposed to sympathise with, it's pretty clear that this is what Dyson, Gatiss, Pemberton and Shearsmith actually think.

But for her to even appear, and it's more or less obligatory that she does, she still has to supply a joke. So now, no longer an Ugly Trans Person, Barbara is an Excessively Touchy Trans Person who seizes on innocuous statements and takes offence to comic effect.

I wonder if Papa Lazarou and Barbara are problems like this because of the way

The League of Gentlemen

engages with its inspirations.

The League of Gentlemen

owes a great deal to classic British TV and cinema of the 60s and 70s, but crucially it engages with that source material in a way that enriches the show. It's instructive here to compare it with

Dr Terrible's House of Horrible

, which is roughly contemporary and which, unlike

The League of Gentlemen

, has not entered the annals of classic comedy. They both get their inspiration from similar places, in fact in several cases the same places – I mentioned

The League of Gentlemen

's odd relationship with sketch comedy, and it's sort of fair to say that it's sketch comedy in the way that an Amicus anthology horror is sketch horror. But where

Dr Horrible

depended on your being familiar with the source material, at least to some extent, to get the gag,

The League of Gentlemen

tells a collection of stories that don't depend on any foreknowledge at all. It's not a parody, and it's not entirely an homage either, although it has parodic elements and homage is threaded through the whole thing.

Rather, it's a comedy that focusses on the absurdity of evil and the equal absurdity of despair and that uses the grammar of classic British horror to tell those stories.

A Beast.

For example, a narrative thread in the fourth episode has workers on a proposed road digging up an inexplicable creature. Mr Chinnery comes to examine it, and proves as incompetent as ever. And while the scene carries a bunch of signifiers that come from Nigel Kneale, echoing

Quatermass

and

Beasts

in particular, and multiplied by the simple fact that Mr Chinnery looks and acts like Tristan Farnham (Peter Davison's character in

All Creatures Great and Small

), the joke doesn't depend on that. It depends on a moment of uncanny horror punctured when the vet's incompetence is revealed once more.

For the joke to land, you don't have to have seen

Baby

or

Quatermass and the Pit

, and while the whole scene is richer if you imagine Tristan Farnham in a Nigel Kneale script, that's not the joke. No, for the joke to land, you just need to have seen Mr Chinnery in action enough for you to be waiting for the moment when he fails catastrophically.

And throughout

The League of Gentlemen

, this texture is present. Royston Vasey is a vaguely comical, Northern-sounding name. But it is also the real name of legendarily foul-mouthed comedian Roy "Chubby" Brown, who himself appears later in the series as the town's mayor. And the joke with the mayor is that he's got a swearing problem, and that's a simple enough joke that you don't need to know who Roy "Chubby" Brown is, or that he's guesting as mayor of a town named after him to get it. That other stuff helps, but it isn't essential.

But the problem with the way that

The League of Gentlemen

mines classic horror and comedy is that sometimes it homages the things that perhaps should be left behind, so you get characters like Babs and Papa Lazarou, who are both beautifully played and well-written comic characters, but who reference stuff that is difficult to justify beyond nostalgia.

The League of Gentlemen

is important as the first sign of the folk horror renaissance that we've had in the last few years. Rather than saying "look at all these ropey old films! Aren't they terrible?"

The League of Gentlemen

embraces them, but crucially makes new things. It's a comedy, but it's also a horror: Edward and Tubbs reference any number of pagan village conspiracies. "We didn't burn him!" blurts Tubbs to the Scottish policeman who comes looking for poor missing Martin, but not before Edward tells Tubbs that she "did it beautifully."  You don't have to know that they're quoting

The Wicker Man

to think they're funny and scary.

There's nothing for

you

here.

The members of

The League of Gentlemen

have taken active part in the rise of folk horror as a recognised genre. Jeremy Dyson scripted the recent film

Ghost Stories.

Shearsmith of course starred in

A Field in England

, and with Pemberton continues to make

Inside No. 9

, an anthology show that combines comedy and drama, and which has had at least a couple of folk horror episodes. The most notable of these is

The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge

, where Pemberton and Shearsmith play 17th century witch hunters. Just like

The League of Gentlemen

,

The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge

isn't a spoof or a parody, it's a black comedy that stands on its own merits, even while it draws inspiration from other sources.

And Reese Shearsmith took part in Folk Horror Revival's 2016 event at the British Museum, hearing about which is how I realised that there was a name for the things I liked.

Mark Gatiss is the man who might be credited for extending the name "folk horror" to a genre (Piers Haggard being the first to apply it consciously to his own film). In his 2010 series

History of Horror

, Gatiss popularised the idea of the Unholy Trinity, and talked at length about

Blood on Satan's Claw

, which probably did more to bring about the critical reassessment of that film than anything else. Gatiss also wrote

Crooked House

, which aired on the BBC in 2008, and the 2013 adaptation of

The Tractate Middoth.

Together with Shearsmith, Gatiss has remade

Blood on Satan's Claw

as an audio drama (released January 2018).

You could argue pretty persuasively that without

The League of Gentlemen

, there might not have been a rebirth of interest in folk horror at all. Without them, it would still be an accidental genre. A local genre, for local people.

My

Patreon

supporters got to see this last week! To support my work and read early, please consider donating. No donation too small.

Posted by

Howard Ingham

at

1:25 pm

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.

interesting read

this pic motivated the search

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQHVqfTZiw_khqpo2AZaRMu1kFLvWgFeO4wkNBNxGKnoLxxu-LI

[gaykamukura]

2-10, 15-20, 26-29, 31-33, 37, 45-48, 51, 52, 59, 60, 63, 67-73, 81, 97, 99, 100

puttin under a read more cause it got long snksnksnskn

2. Favourite protagonist?

i’m gunna be real, i like playing as hajime a lot plus theres some moments where he’s being ridiculous and you’re powerless to stop it so you’re just there, face in your hands, losing your shit snickering.

3. Favourite antagonistic character?

points at my url gently...i know i’m an izuru kinnie but i think he has a lot of nuance espec cause he can fit an antagonist role while still being generally neutral on the havoc he wreaks

4. Favourite character?

i’m very bad at choosing but taka was my first fave and the first character i ever grew attached to that was ripped from me so i’m gonna say taka

5. Best girl?

hina, sakura, ibuki, peko, miu!!! i think my “type” is the girls who are either super stoic or super energetic pffft

6. Best boy?

i already talked abt taka earlier so kazuichi and leon are my beloved weenies

7. Favourite class trial from all the games?

the last class trial in the first game where you as makoto get to earn the title ultimate hope and the mastermind is finally revealed after the 20+ hours of grief and struggle you’ve just been put through and you get that satisfying ending of the mastermind paying for their crimes and everyone getting to go free is just...so good and so climactic i adore it

8. Least favourite character?

if i was in a room and my choices were to delete hifumi yamada from existence and die or survive while having hifumi yamada remain in this world i would choose to sacrifice myself

9. Least favourite class trial?

probably the second one in the first game, because it had all the things i was upset with. the way the genocide jack/jill and toko situation was handled was awful even with it taken in consideration that the game usually uses very trope-y characters, and the whooole thing with chihiro is uncomfortable for the entire trial, and then it all ends with an execution where if you think about it too much it makes your stomach whirl

10. What would be your Ultimate Title?

hmmm something like ultimate tarot card reader or ultimate divination/psychic maybe!!!

15. Your absolute OTP?

oh god i ship everything...i like komahina a lot though even tho i have another handful of ships for hajime

16. Your absolute BROTP?

fuyuhiko and nagito obviously

17. Do you have an OT3? Which one?

none that i can think of rn even tho i’m definitely open to a lot of them...i support gundham dating both sonia and kazuichi while sonia and kazuichi are best friends tho

18. Favourite rare ship?

i’m rly fond of fuyuhiko/nekomaru [hikomaru???] and kamuegi

19. Who do you think is an underrated character?

i feel like toko doesn’t get nearly enough love oh my gosh...i see her dismissed as an accessory to byakuya or “the girl w the serial killer” so often and it makes me so upset...also mukuro generally gets outright ignored even though there’s a lot to her

20.  Who do you think is an overrated character?

i feel like i see a lot of stuff for mikan everywhere??? but i...don’t like her that much. her personality kinda feels like the same thing all the time, under the despair disease she feels like junko 2 electric boogaloo or tsumugi the squeakquel, and her execution was underwhelming. and she also killed ibuki, the best gal :(

26. Favourite execution?

oh god definitely leon’s. the first execution of the first game and it goes hard as hell. it’s one of the few if only times you see red blood in the game, he goes out kicking and screaming in a way that you have to feel sorry for him. it’s an unbelievable way to start off the game and really encapsulates all of the wild ride danganronpa is gonna put you in for.

27. Least favourite execution?

as i said before, mikan’s was...underwhelming. as the ultimate nurse who spent her life being a doormat only to kill out of love, there’s an amazing amount of executions and ideas that would have been full of nuance and really interesting but instead she just gets blasted into fucking orbit

28. Favourite unused execution?

oh god i love byakuya’s unused execution because it’s one of those executions that focuses less on the character’s talent and more on the character’s fear. when you realize what byakuya’s future could have been, pretty much complete estrangement from the family and having to build up everything on his own with the fear of poverty constantly looming.

plus the fact that he fights because he could have condemned his half-siblings to that fate only for he, himself, to lose in a killing game and die thinking he was a disgrace is so painful. not to mention the execution itself is a slow and painful death.

it’s so brutal, so focused on breaking every fear and effort of the character, that i think it’s one of those executions that would come to mind whenever you wanted a picture definition for “despair”.

29. Which character should survived in your opinion?

leon kuwata should have lived...he was talented but he was still a normal-ish boy who couldve kept everyone at their wits in the killing game by reminding them what was waiting for them out there. lots of others but i’ve been thinking of baseball husband lately

31. Is there a character you think who shouldn’t have survived but did?

i love yasuhiro that weed smoking boy but he was too dumb to live

32. Least favourite protagonist?

uhhh hmmm i like all of them but kaede had the least screentime so she’s a protagonist where her personality isn’t 100% crystal-clear so. i GUESS

33. Character with the best clothing?

i want chiaki’s hoodie and backpack and LOOK more than i want to breathe oxygen. junko also has a fucking aesthetic

37. Favourite minor character? 

taichi fujisaki i guess??? programmer dad

45. Unpopular opinion?

i dunno what other people think of this because i haven’t heard anything about it, but the closing argument minigame was better in sdr1

46. Unpopular headcanon?

i think genocide jack/jill is nonbinary but i’ve never seen anybody else who has the same headcanon

47. A headcanon you have about a character?

one of my long-time headcanons is that makoto is trans...yeet

48. Favourite OST?

danganronpa 2 has bop after bop. miss monomi’s practice lesson? bop. all the execution themes? bops. ikoroshia and ekoroshia? bops. i am constantly jamming the fuck out in this game

51. Character you thought you were gonna dislike but loved in the end?

i thought i was always gonna hate hiyoko and yeah she does have flaws but i actually like her a lot more than i used to

52. Character you thought you would like but disliked in the end?

thought korekiyo was gonna be a cool dude who was a lil weird and emo but still fun. boy was i wrong. im stealing him from spiky chunky until they learn to stop it

59. Favourite moment?

again, the final trial in the first game is fucking amazing, but also the final trial in the second game with hajime and chiaki plus all the izuru stuff and all the messages there r just. good as hell aaah

60. Saddest moment?

all of chapter 2 in sdr2 was painful. mahiru, who was a force of good, dies, the trial is difficult, the twilight syndrome murder case is terrifying, hiyoko is mourning and you have to spit it right back in her face for awhile that she’s the prime suspect...

and then the only reward you get for finding the real killer is feeling guilty as the tears run and then your final reward is getting to watch as one of your friends dies while the other gets mortally injured and barely survives and then only a bit of gametime later attempts suicide in front of you. it is blow after blow w/o breaks

63. Describe Kyoko Kirigiri in 3 words! 

lovely detective lady

67. Which character would you never want to meet in real life?

hifumi because i would be wearing an anime tshirt cause im a fucking weeb and then he’d be an incel while i suffered just trying to buy a lifetime supply of panda candy from hot topic

68. Which character would you like to meet in real life?

kazuichi cause he seems p chill and like the type of person you could just hang out with or have a chat with casually and not have to worry about first impressions and stuff like that

69. Choose one character which you would take with you on a trip.

70. Character you would have a sleepover with?

chiaki because we’re both super sleepy but we could also play a bunch of games together and then pass out together with a bunch of snacks

71. Character you can relate to?

sorry to be kinnie on main but izuru, i relate to that feeling of always excelling at everything you do and as a result being constantly bored, so whether what happens is good or bad doesn’t matter so long as it’s interesting

72. Character you can relate to but you dislike them?

kokichi, again being kinnie on main but while i relate i dislike it because it’s a reminder of my tendency to lie to others and to myself for any number of purposes

73. Character who deserved better?

[sniffles softly] taka. also keebo. toko too tbh

81. Could you be the Ultimate Lucky Student? 

probably??? my luck varies from being unbelievably good and unbelievably bad so hey

97. Overrated ship which is your NOTP? 

toko/byakuya for sure. i don’t like the it(tm)

99. Your absolute NOTP?

junko being shipped with anyone but especially with the sdr2 cast because it is gross. let the sdr2 cast do the right thing and get to pull a knife on junko instead

100. Opinion on all the Protagonists!

makoto: a boy who has a mouth and must scream. he’s not having a good time but hes trying his best

hajime: a good, refined boy. he knows how to say and spell big words like antidisestablishmentarianism, or however that goddamn word is spelled. the most paranoid boy

komaru: a good gal, a lil anxious but very strong and ready to kick ass. a funky little lesbian

toko: a blessed gal who needs more appreciation. her time as a protagonist is extremely gay, meaning she is also a funky little lesbian.

kaede: she doesn’t have much screen time but i appreciate her. she’s nice to people and confident whereas everyone else in this series is nervous

shuichi: nervous and emo, shuichi truly represents teenage america in the years 2007-2012, possibly 2013. i adore him

[smokeybrandreviews]

Disappointment

I love comics. I do. I’ve loved them since I was a small boy. I remember fondly, journeys to my local comic shop before it closed. I remember buying first editions of Aliens versus Predator, Alien: Earth War, The Killing Joke and those three issues of Amazing Spider-Man where Carnage debuted. That panel where Pete realizes Carnage left him a message in his own blood? Chilling. I remember the dour feeling I got when I first witnessed Miller’s bleak, almost nihilistic , take on Batman with his masterpiece, The Dark Knight returns. I remember the jubilation as I scanned the pages upon pages of graphic violence in McFarlane’s Spawn for the first time. The Violator fast became one of my all-time favorites Comic villains. I watched the comic bubble grow and grow until it burst and the fall of an entire industry toward the late 90s, early 00’s. I remember the cringe worthy, poorly written, maxi-events born distinctly from that ridiculous “extreme everything” epoch of the mid 90s. I was excited when the industry rebounded on the back of epic storytelling and art that was head and shoulders above what I had as a youth, in the late 00s, early 10s. Even now, I pick up any one of the Bat books DC is shilling and I am wildly impressed. Capullo’s run, in particular, has been a creative and narrative refreshment. I’m going to miss him when he’s gone. I love comics as much as I love film, anime, manga, and f*cking pancakes. My geek card is legit and punched, particularly for Marvel Comics.

I love a good Marvel book. Don’t get me wrong, I can dig a DC outing, I rather enjoyed Judas Contract and Death in the Family in particular, but Marvel always felt real to me. DC comics was escapism. They were Gods pretending to be human in my eyes, the ideal way to live. That made sense to me as I grew older because they were created in a time where escapism was needed. Most of the groundwork for DC was laid in the 30s. WWII was beginning to rear it’s ugly head and there was a necessity for the American populace to have a place to divert their attention to fantastic tales in order to distract from the horrific realities of the world.  Marvel was born in the sixties. They’re a product of one of the most socially tumultuous times in out history. Marvel heroes are people thrust into godhood. They have to learn how to be heroes because they are inherently flawed, they are inherently human. There are no Superman allegories here, no perfect specimens to light the way for humanity. Nah, their cast was a cast of assholes just like the rest of us, just trying to stay above water. Only they can shoot f*cking lasers from their eyes sometimes. While DC relegated their more socially experimental or controversial stories to the oblivion of Vertigo or Elseworlds, Marvel embraced them. Reed Richards became an emotionally distant asshole. Tony Stark became a functioning alcoholic. The allegorical comparison of Mutants being black people struggling for human rights during the civil unrest of the 60s was not lost on anyone with a brain. I loved that Marvel let their heroes be human, first. I loved that they made mistakes and that those mistakes had real consequences. I loved that I could look at a comic and see myself, in both demeanor and ethnicity. Spider-Man is my all time favorite comic character. I wrote about this before but I WAS Pete as a kid and I think that’s why he’s so endearing. He is the best of that Marvel lot and epitomizes the genius Stan, John, and Jack had when they crafted the most endearing literary universe in the last century.

The fact that i love Marvel so much is why I am hurting with the direction they have decided to take with all of this SJW nonsense. If you know Marvel’s history, if you’ve read their books, then you know they were already one of the most progressive companies out there. I mean, they’re genesis was one steeped in social awakening! Hell, I’m not even mad Marvel is shoehorning all of this PC propaganda in their books or killing off characters I love (**cough**Wolverine**cough**), or subsisting on year-long maxi events or allowing Slott to ruin Spider-Man! Actually, I am livid about that Slott nonsense but I’ll get to that. I’m not mad Thor is a woman. She is a great character and a breath of fresh air in a narrative that was growing a bit stale for me. Jane Foster being Thor gave way to The Unworthy Thor story line, which is probably the best written Thor arc I have ever read. I’m not mad Mockingbird is a feminist. How can she not be? I rather enjoyed Spider-Island and that little tease at the end with MJ and Pete? That made my heart flutter. Speaking of, my favorite book at the moment is Renew Your Vows. Goddamn do I miss Pete and MJ and that book just reminds me of everything that could have been. F*cking Slott, man… I ADORE the direction they’ve taken Talon (X-23 and the current Wolverine for those of you who don’t know Laura’s actual X-Men code name) and i even like a little of that whole Cyclops fiasco fallout. A little bit, not all of it. There are a few things SJW Marvel has done well, their increasing diversity is a big one, but it feels like those good things pale in comparison to the issue, I think, that is crippling Marvel; The writing is mostly sh*t now.

SJW Marvel feels like they’ve traded actual, inspired, storytelling for “Woke” gimmicks and a pandered slathering of social commentary. There are too many soap boxes now and not enough passion in crafting a compelling narrative. Dan Slott (I told you I’d get to this asshat) is a perfect example of this bullsh*t. Bro has taken Spider-Man and basically turned him into Tony Stark. He’s erased, literally erased by having Pete and MJ cut a deal with the goddamn devil, their marriage and all of the history they’ve had together. In the process, he’s ruined Mary Jane as a character and that sucks. Well, Joe Queseda did but Slott has perpetuated this bullsh*t and treated SPider-Man as little more than a goddamn fan fiction. His run on Amazing has regressed Spider-man back to those harrowing and swinging days of being a College Freshman but with a multi-billion dollar tech company. For a second there, I even think Peter was an international spy or some sh*t. It’s wild nonsense that is just north of power fantasy and it’s stupid! What happened to the great tales we got like Kraven’s Last Hunt or Torment? Why do I have to sit through The Superior Spider-Man?? F*ck, then there’s THAT fuckery. Doctor Octopus is literally a Spider-man clone now? He is, and I am not sh*tting you right now, living in a perfect clone of Peter Parker, powers and all. But he leads Hydra or some sh*t. We’ll circle back around to that in a second, let me tell you, but first, this whole Fantastic Four bullsh*t. I liked Secret Wars II. I thought it was interesting that Doom finally got his wish and became a f*cking god. I thought his characterization in that whole event was brilliant. What I didn’t like? Marvel using that event to essentially erase the Fantastic Four. I liked Sue. She was a great character and had grown considerably over the years. All of that, gone. More to the point, I loved Valeria and her interactions with Doom. Those few books where she actually plays Robin and conscious to Doom’s villainy are spectacular. Marvel essentially nixing that relationship just to scorn Fox feels a lot like Slott nixing MJ because he thinks Peter should be a hoe. It’s all stupid and disheartening. But the fact that these “creators”, cats that have been entrusted with character beloved by generations of people, are simply doing sh*t they want on a whim because, and i’ve seen said creators post sh*t like his on the Facebooks, fans don’t know what they want. They have to tell us what we want. F*ck you, bro.

Both circumstances are f*cking ridiculous and do nothing but leave the characters and company less. And it’s not just these instances. Riri Williams has a ton of potential but sucks and everyone hates her because she’s written as a smart-mouthed b*tch. America Chaves is another missed opportunity! A latina lesbian who ha the power to Super Boy-Prime punch her way around the galaxy? Sign me up! Wait, never mind, because the people writing your book are lousy. And, oh my god, what did they do to my Carol Danvers?? I LOVE Ms. Marvel. Her stint in Might Avengers and Heroic Age solidified that she could be the premiere female Marvel hero. In my eyes, Carol is their Wonder Woman and, for a time, she was on her way. Now? After all of these SJW brandings and agendas have made her power absorbing Hitler, basically, not so much. They’ve destroyed her character, assassinating any real progress she’s made as a person, in an effort to portray her as a feminist icon. She was already one of those! She was becoming more than that. She was transcending that whole Rule 63 action of her origins. She was becoming real. Now, she’s a f*cking cartoon, worse off than when she flew around in the stomach bearing bikini, pretending to be Mar-Vell’s side kick or lover or whatever.

Carol Danvers doesn’t have to be the new version of Captain Hydra And then there’s THAT debacle. Secret Empire was a goddamn cash grab and the biggest farce I have read out of Marvel since Onslaught. At least Onslaught had a dope antagonist. A villain that was connected to the lore and true it’s roots. Cap is a Nazi? Really? Get the f*ck out of here with that nonsense. And the ending? Just a bit too fan service-y for me. There was a living deus ex machina. Seriously, ClassicCap was pulled out of nowhere, by the power of a sentient cosmic cube, to punch out HydraCap. The allegory is just so heavy handed, it’s borderline insulting to my intelligence as the reader. I cannot stress how ridiculous this entire situation was, this entire stupid goddamn “event”. Also, the f*ck was up with Dead No More? Didn’t we learn our lesson about clones with Ben Reily and that whole clusterf*ck of a Clone Saga? Why are we even doing this nonsense again?? SO not only are your new arcs stupid, but you are rehashing old, failed, ones as well? Really Marvel?

It’s not just the writing though, either. The art for most of these books is atrocious. Anything Olivier Coipel or Esad Ribic touch with a pencil is god’s work and Kris Anka is one of my favorites but the redesigns of some of those classic outfits are terrible. I mean, Spider-Man’s tech suit is ass. Riri’s armor looks like a knock off Rescue mod, and Foster’s Thor comes across as a hodge-podge of nonsense. That classic Ms. Marvel Leotard is my favorite of her outfits but I get the upgrade to her current garb. Running around in stilettos with your ass out doesn’t really bode well for gaining confidence that you can protect the general public from giant, interdimensional, crab monsters or rouge government assassi-bots. What i don’t like is how masculine Carol’s drawn now. Chick isn’t She-Hulk, yo. Why you got her so yoked? Carol Danvers was a vision of beauty, legit model caliber. She’s always been fit, yeah, but there was still a softness to her. Just a touch, I’d say. Now, chick is a rock of f*cking angst granite. Not only is she poorly written but her overall design is sh*t! It’s like, goddamn Marvel! You want to push Ms. Marvel to the front, give me something to work with. How am I supposed to root for an ugly, b*tchy, incompetent who constantly makes decisions that get people killed? How is THIS “Captain Marvel” a leader?? Bro, speaking of “leaders”, Sam Wilson Cap is ridiculous. That sh*t feels like blatant tokenism, particularly when there have already been several black captain Americas in Marvel history. There was this whole Tuskegee allusion about it. One of the grand kids was in the Young Avengers, for chrissake!

I don’t know, man. I think Marvel needs to take a step back and figure why things were so good back in the day. Why the Ultimate universe was so successful and then why it wasn’t. I think they need to get some fresh blood in those executive chairs, cats with actual vision and a very poignant, very innovative, story to tell because what I’m getting now feels a lot like that Extreme nonsense I got right before everything fell apart. The art might be better but the narratives are not. What I got with Secret Wars II feels a lot like what I got with the Clone Saga or Identity Crisis or Future Imperfect and them sh*ts were terrible. Legacy has a ton of potential but if it’s just a way to bring actual Jean Grey back from the dead, you can keep that sh*t. Give me back Wolverine. Let Laura and her father have some adventures. It feels like a crime Gabby hasn’t met her grandpa. Give me back Pete and MJ. You’ve already taken his daughter, first love, and uncle. At least let the guy have his wife. Give me back Doom and Valeria. The potential those two have together is profound and vastly untapped. Look, I get it. I’m pining for a bygone era but what an era it was!

Times are changing and this SJW sh*t is becoming the status quo. If you want to exist in this society, you have to embrace that sh*t to an extent. All I’m saying is don’t be so heavy handed with it. Have some tact. Use a deft touch. It‘s not difficult to be inclusive without being obnoxious about it or ruining entire character histories for a year or two of upped sales. Marvel Comics is actually hemorrhaging money at the moment because of this ridiculous turn in narrative. Marvel Studios is essentially holding them up. Those motherf*ckers are printing money for Disney. Actually, Marvel Comics only has to look as far as their cinema counterpart to get the blueprint. Spider-Man: Homecoming is how you traverse this new age of social wokeness. Those cats wrote an outstanding story, full of diversity and social commentary, and grounded it in a world that felt real. And they did it with excellent characterization as well as a true reverence for the source material. Homecoming felt more like Spider-Man than any of the other Spider-Man films and it kept true to the modern social current effortlessly.

That’s how you write Spider-Man. That’s how you write, period. That’s how Marvel Comics needs to write if they want to salvage their company. Hell, Logan is another great example. So are both of the Guardian films. Pretty sure Ragnorok is another and Black Panther was all about that sh*t. It’s wild to me that films, created for the sole purpose of getting scratch, cobbled together by a committee of producers and executives, can create something that has more depth, scope, vision, and soul than the motherf*ckers entrusted with the legacy of goddamn source material, themselves. That says so much about the people in charge of my beloved Marvel comics and what it says depresses the f*ck out of me.

[unbearablylight]

Hi! I loved your AHS: Cult post, you summed up a lot of the thoughts I had on the wasted potential this season's premise has. I was just wondering what your thoughts were on the previous seasons? I find them to be really hit or miss in terms of tackling social themes and just storytelling overall and I would love to hear your thoughts! :)

Thank you! I liked your addendum, too; I hadn’t heard Adina Porter was coming back so I’m interested to see what she’ll add. And yeah, I agree a lot of it tends to be really hit or miss. I’m going to try to make this as brief as possible, because otherwise I could write an entire thesis on AHS and that’s probably too long for right now.

The best way to do it is to probably give my ranking of seasons and a short reasoning as to why. So, here goes:

1. Murder House

Granted it’s been a while since I’ve watched this season, but from what I remember it wasn’t really trying to be anything other than a really terrifying show. And it was great at that. The plot is sometimes a little confusing or nonexistent, but it terrifies in a way that no other season has really done to me since. There doesn’t seem to be much of a message or tie in to social themes, besides possibly Jamie Brewer playing such a large and beloved character. Ryan Murphy often has really great concepts for TV shows that then fade out over time, but since this is the first season, it was fun and exciting and something new on television.

2. Hotel

For a while, I’ve been debating whether or not Hotel beat out Asylum, but as I’m writing this I feel like it did, so I’m putting it second. This is largely based on personal opinion more than anything. Hotel felt like a rebirth for the show. It was creepy and twisted, had a decent plot and characters you could root for, and was actually scary where Coven and Freak Show hadn’t really been. I think the addition of Lady Gaga was an excellent one, and she was used just the perfect amount. I had feared she would become Jessica Lange’s replacement, and I think a lot of the downfall of Coven and Freak Show stems from too much of a focus on Lange, but Gaga was merely another member of the ensemble cast.

While I didn’t care much for Wes Bentley’s character, I loved the whole Ten Commandments murder thing (really anything that twists biblical stuff is fascinating to me for some reason). Denis O’Hare worried me at first, but I think the show did a good job at telling a heartfelt, honest story about Liz’s relationship with her son towards the later part of the season. I only wish they had cast an actual transgender actress. Again, I think what you said in your addition to the Cult post is right: AHS is better when social themes are pieces of the show, not entire concepts. This is another one that just seems to want to tell a story.

3. Asylum

The reason I rank Asylum lower is I really could not get into Sarah Paulson’s character for some reason, which sucked because she was most of the focus. I feel like I should go back and rewatch this season now that I love her as an actress, because when I originally watched it she drove me nuts. Other than that, I think it’s about equal with Hotel — decent plot (I think the story derails mostly with the aliens because, like, what?), a medium amount of scary, some good characters. Sarah playing a lesbian at first seemed out of place to me, but when it landed her in the Asylum I understood why they did it. Evan being in an interracial relationship kinda pricked me though. Ryan Murphy seems to have this weird thing for doing something mildly taboo (usually in a sort of socially forward-thinking way) and feeling edgy for it. “It’s the 60s and he’s with a black girl, gasp!” It didn’t really tie into anything with the plot, and the girl hardly appears throughout the season, so it felt like nothing more than a pat on the back for making a statement.

It does have one of the best opening credit sequences, though.

4. Roanoke

Roanoke had the benefit of being really goddamn scary a lot of the time, but the plot was an utter nightmare of writing. One show within a show was already kind of annoying, two was getting ridiculous. By the end we had like 6 and I just wanted it to be over with.

I honestly don’t remember a lot of what was going on, other than they were a bunch of idiots trapped in Murder House Part 2. I know you mentioned Adina and the racial subtext she faced throughout the season, but this would have been a lot more effective if she hadn’t been like... the actual worst. Being unfairly criminalized and vilified for killing her husband would have been far more effective if she hadn’t actually done it. I really just kind of hated her by the end and was furious she was the one that got to survive (although the very ending of the show makes it clear as to why it has to be her).

And speaking of surviving, Sarah Paulson should have walked away from all of this. She survives the entire night, only to get gunned down by a bunch of police officers. Which, just... it doesn’t make sense? She’s a white woman who appears to be in distress. If anything, I was surprised Adina wasn’t shot. It would have been terrible, but she was a black woman who already was widely disliked and who might have killed an entire house full of people (from the cops’ perspective, not knowing the truth of Roanoke). That whole scene just felt very weird and out of touch with reality to me, idk. I’m tired of seeing cops shoot first and ask questions later, so basically that scene just shouldn’t have happened at all. There are a hundred other ways Sarah could have died.

5. Freak Show

I am probably the only person I know who ranks Freak Show anywhere other than last, but I’ll get to why when I get to Coven.

It’s not good. We all know that. It wasn’t scary, the plot’s all over the place and uninteresting, and the amount of potential it had made it a real let down. It does have some saving graces, though. Murphy has experience with this sort of “god help the outcasts” narrative from Glee. Jessica Lange is a slightly more interesting character than she was in Coven, albeit they’re far too similar, Evan Peters is actually a person, and Sarah Paulson delivers one of (two of?) her best performances in my opinion.

The major downfalls: I did not care about Kathy Bates at all (tbh, I don’t think she’s had a good character yet, except maybe the Butcher). The last episode where they just shoot everyone dead was a major copout. There are far more interesting ways to end a show, or even to kill a large portion of the cast. Emma Roberts suffers the second most brutal death in AHS history, trapped in a box and sawed in half by Neil Patrick Harris. I don’t know what it is about this show, but it loves to see Emma suffer at the complete mercy of a man.

Also, it was just really boring.

6. Coven

Oh, Coven. Where to even begin with you. This post has already gotten really long so I’ll try to condense as much as I can, but just know I could probably write a novel on why Coven is The Worst. And I think at the foundation of that is the fact that a large portion (maybe even the majority?) of the fandom considers it to be the best, if not up there. Which is just really harmful.

You take a season full of really incredible actresses. Like there are a lot of them, many of them very well-known and highly acclaimed. You stick them all in a house together, in a pseudo-sorority type of situation. What you should get is one of the strongest arguments for how women can lead a show and hold their own without men.

Instead, what we got was Coven. In which every female character is poorly written, exists solely for a man, and/or is there to compete with (and often be bitchy to) the other women.

A bulleted list of further atrocities (because there are too many):

Emma Roberts suffering the most brutal death in AHS history. Watching her get choked out by Evan on that bed for like a full minute (despite the fact that she was a powerful witch who could have killed him in a nanosecond) disturbed me to no end, especially given their history.

Kathy Bates suffering from Murphy’s Law of No Character Development (patent pending). Ryan Murphy sucks at sticking to character development. Bates could have been a really powerful tool to show that ignorance often is the root of hatred, and her relationship with Gabourey Sidibe could have caused a change of heart, but one episode she was actually learning, and the next she was back to her shitty racist old self again.

Gabourey Sidibe playing the Race Card. And I don’t take that term lightly. I mean she literally said “You don’t like me ‘cause I’m black,” when a) no one had expressed any disdain to her at all (outside of Emma Roberts’ general bitching to all of them), and b) her weight probably got more comments than her race had. This line literally sounded like something written by a white dude who probably thinks reverse racism is real.

The race politics were a mess in general, tbh. Especially concerning their different uses of magic.

Lily Rabe dying??? For no reason??? Rude more than anything else.

Jessica Lange syndrome started to take over the show in this season, and this was her worst character. She shouldn’t have been so much of a focus.

The only good things to happen this season were Jessica and Angela taking out those business men (iconic, but from what I can tell — because I don’t remember exactly — the Axeman does most of the killing for them), the Coven chasing out the Axeman, and Sarah becoming the supreme (which I had unfortunately guessed like 3 episodes in, so it wasn’t that much of a mystery).

Anyways, Coven is pretty much a catalogue of the worst parts of Ryan Murphy’s writing, and there’s probably a lot I’m missing, but this is enough for now.

Sorry this is so long, yikes. But that about wraps it up I think. Honestly if you read all of this, congrats haha. And thanks for asking! I love to rant about tv (obviously).