#because his worldview cannot encapsulate not feeling How The World Changed In 2001 down to your bones

[zahri-melitor]

Thinking more about Tom King; I do wonder how much of how he’s viewed on tumblr is a result of the following two facts:-

The majority of the DC comics fandom on tumblr does not have personal memories of 2001

The majority of the DC comics fandom on tumblr is not prepared to give government security or intelligence the time of day as having a necessary purpose

It sounds a bit ‘you don’t know what you’re missing’ but fundamentally I think part of the problem is that you’re (generally) too young to appreciate many of King’s fundamental storytelling elements, because you’re too young to remember or care about the topics he keeps going back to interrogate.

And this is something that comes up in conversations I have with friends who are school teachers and university lecturers all the time, because September 11 for the majority of their students has now moved from category 1 here to category 3:

Core ‘where were you’ memory (people born early 90s or before)

Foundation of their childhood status quo (mid 90s to mid 2000s; maybe as late as 2007-2008)

History (late 2000s onwards)

They’re the ones at the forefront of talking about this with their students, and it’s moved from ‘default background for undergraduates’ now into ‘history that has an effect on the present’. They’re now too young to have soaked in the exhaustingly omnipresent US patriotism of the culture of the 2000s. And so the reaction of current students as a cohort to things heavily based or reflective on this period is fundamentally different to someone who lived through it.

A similar, earlier comparison would be writers who frame everything through the lens of the Cold War as an analogy for their writing. I’m a category 2 for the fall of the USSR, and I grew up with that dividing line; there was a lot of media made in the 90s that still premised the Soviets as existing into the future (very early 90s stuff that hadn’t been fixed in time) or that frantically had had a word find-replace for “Soviet” to “Russian” but the general attitude hadn’t changed (good comics example here is go read any of KGBeast’s appearances around Knightfall in DC comics; they’re really struggling with what to do about him). There was also even more media that still wanted to hammer Cold War themes but invented new fake countries to overlay it onto and to discuss as being the background of proxy wars, so they had the out of ‘this isn’t a real place, it’s Markovia/Kaznia/Pan Balgravia or Qurac/Kahndaq/Bialya’.

Many of these got further use for decades up until the present, partly because Central Asia has remained a hotspot for conflict for decades as a result of the fallout of the Cold War proxy conflicts, and partly because shoving extra expy states into Europe means you can play with the politics without having to be exact.

Because to me, this is what I see King doing to the present. And why it sticks out is that most people aren’t harping on the themes constantly anymore like they were 20 years ago. But for King it’s a well he keeps going back to because he was so heavily involved in it and didn’t really get the chance to start processing it until he left the CIA around 2010 and started working his feelings out in stories.

Because yes, at this point he’s beating a dead horse, but there are also incredibly successful writers of military thrillers who are STILL writing veiled ‘it’s the Soviets’ or ‘it’s the Arab Terrorists’ plots and selling. There’s clearly an audience for it. The audience just is an aging one.

And as someone who does remember the period, some of his work is extremely ‘oh god I remember’ and some of it is genuinely well thought through analogies interrogating the topic. Media and storytelling are frequently in conversation with the world and with themes the writer cares about. And I think we can all tell how large some of this loomed in Tom King’s life.