#literally barely understand the concept of a lot of the DC and Marvel stuff and often don't know the characters

[decaf-mother]

Someone explain to me how I unintentionally created a bunch of hero OCS in my head. I am not active enough in those types of fandoms to warrant this. What do I do with these guys. They are just kinda hanging out in my brain lookin' all cute and like- dude. I have nothing for you to do. LMAO

[helenofsimblr]

I have a LOT of catching up to do!

I was tagged to do the 57 facts thing by @fayts4 @tabbyrhsims4simblr and @midnightdevotions I think I got everybody if not you’ll have to forgive me my shoddy memory. But I have so many blogs to catch up on I am ready to cry!

1. Simblr is a secret thing for me, only my husband knows about it. Its my own guilty pleasure.

2. I recently became a parent and I am very much planning to have at least 1 more while there is still time!

3. I have done a lot of work on some really amazing stuff, none of which I can ever talk about due to secrecy agreements. 

4. I have a PhD in mathematics, so that proves I am super boring.

5. I tried my first cigarette at age 11, but didn’t touch it again till age 26 which was when I took it up, I would smoke anything from 0 to 10 cigs a day depending on the day I had. I quit cigs this year aged 32 in January. So hopefully didn’t do myself too much damage.

6. At age 29 I started smoking cigars on special occasions those are: my birthday, Christmas, New year, Valentines, and my wedding anniversary. Being the “badass” I am, I inhale every 5th drag for a little extra kick, even though you shouldn’t do that... I have not quit the cigars!

7. I have a younger brother and an older sister, I am the middle sibling.

8. I have only ever had 3 boyfriends in my life. And 1 “fancy man.”

9. I was engaged to be married to my second boyfriend, I basically twisted his arm into it because of my condition I was afraid I’d be some old woman called Ms instead of Mrs, he did not want to be married, not to me anyway. I should have realised that back then...

10. While I was engaged to boyfriend number 2 I had an affair which lasted about 8 months, it was with a colleague at work, and it was amazing! I don’t condone cheating, not in the least, but I realise, the sensible thing to do would have been to call off the engagement. 

11. I had giganstism (Acromegaly) as a child, I am 6 foot 7 inches tall bare foot. I do not like being this tall... not one bit. There are so many health issues that come with this, that it really isn’t worth it.

12. When I stopped growing, Acromegaly causes your face and hands and feet to carry on growing... I have size 14 feet. UK size. My hands are large enough that I can grip 4 tennis balls in one hand easily. 

13. I have no tattoos. I have never ever wanted a tattoo. I don’t actually like them very much.

14. I don’t have any piercings anywhere else beside my ears. I have 2 piercings in each ear.

15. I am a huge petrol head. I love cars and I will happily have a discussion with any man about them, or woman if she is so inclined!

16. Due to the facial changes caused by Acromegaly I decided to go and get cosmetic surgery in late 2017 to change my face back to a more softer look.

17. I love Star Trek. Captain Kirk is my favourite captain, he is the best. No discussion. If it wasn’t for Kirk there would be no Picard, no Sisko, no Janeway. None of those pretenders would be here!

18. I think Quentin Tarrantino and his films are vastly overrated and often incomprehensible and worst yet, non linear. 

19. I really dislike the taste of alcohol. The only drinks I get on well with are Guiness and Gin and tonics. Most others I don’t like. I hate wine.

20. I hated that stupid Pokemon Go craze!! The amount of people who walked into me in the street... That shit was dangerous.

21. My hair used to be naturally blonde, but in recent years its started to get darker, which is why I now use colouring to keep it where it was.

22. I should wear glasses to read, but I don’t bother.

23. While preggers I had gestational diabetes. Which was not fun at all.

24. I love swimming, but I hate the sea because I am afraid of whats in it. Sharks, jellyfish, all sorts of wonderful, yet horrid creatures designed to kill and maim!

25. When I was doing my PhD, somebody on my research team literally took about 80% of my thesis content and used it in their thesis. I had  no time to appeal or go through proper channels as I already had a job lined up, and was due to have my pituitary tumor removed, therefore, my only option was to redo 80% of my thesis. 

26. I am not religious (at least not in any organised way), however, I find the theory of how the universe came into being utterly laughable. A big bang... seriously?? If before the universe, there was nothing, where did the shit that exploded come from? Its bullshit. Truth is, nobody knows for sure, but we’re so desperate to know that scientists will happily invent theories to fit what few facts they have.

27. Despite not being religious, I firmly believe in existence after death. I say existence, not life, there is a difference. I have seen what would be colloquially referred to as a “ghost” when I was 13 years old.

28. I love the old pulp sci fi, things like Lost in Space, and voyage to the bottom of the sea

29. My favourite foods are pizzas. I cannot get enough of them! In particular just bog standard pepperoni

30. I suck at sports. Any sport, and I suck at it.

31. I often worry about things so much I lose my perspective, I cannot help but worry and it usually leads to a cascade of worry and I may make poor decisions. 

32. I am part German. I can speak German, to a fashion... its not very good as I rarely use it.

33. I have regular chiropractic care and I have to say its worth every penny. I feel better physically now than I have in years! As a bonus, the IBS I suffered with, since I have been seeing my chiropractor has actually cleared up! 

34. I am currently trying to complete something on my bucket list, I am attempting to watch EVERY John Wayne film.

35. I hated Star Wars the Last Jedi. Shit film!

36. I have a cuddly toy from I was a baby which I still have! (I don’t sleep with it of course)

37. I love inappropriate/dirty jokes.

38. I am, somewhat, anti-abortion. I understand there is a time and a place for everything however, but given birth control and access to morning after pills... 

39. I am not political, I loathe politicians. None of them have a clue what it is like to be in the real world. Also... why do we have Ministers of health who have never been a nurse or doctor? And so forth... doesn’t make sense!

40. I have been married 3 years now. 

41. I cannot bend over and touch my toes.

42. I recently took a woman to court and won! After she keyed (Scratched the car with a key) my Range Rover from bumper to bumper in the supermarket. 

43. I hate shopping. I find it so tedious and inconvenient. I honestly do not understand how other females can find this a pleasurable activity!

44. I have never tried any illegal drugs in my life.

45. Apparently I was late performing all my children milestones. Walking, talking and potty training. I took months longer than my siblings did.

46. I find it really hard to go to the toilet in a public toilet. It disturbs me.

47. I hate it when people tell me “You’re late.” As though I have no concept or track of time. I usually reply with “I was quite aware before you pointed it out.” I never apologise for being late, unless I know that my being late was definitely my fault.

48. I am often amused by simblr. Especially at all these “dramas” that pop up round here. Particularly over custom content and how it should never be uploaded by anybody but the creator or changed or whatever... did I mention how somebody took 80% of my PhD thesis and used it in their work? Oh yes. Point number 25.

49. If I go for ice cream, doesn’t matter where it is, I will always go for vanilla.

50. White chocolate is my favourite chocolate of all. So sweet and creamy...

51. I am allergic to penicillin.

52. I love superhero films. Particularly the Marvel ones. I think Marvel do better films than DC but DC do better animated films / television than Marvel do.

53. I think Nolan’s batman trilogy is overrated speaking of superhero films.

54. Speaking of films, only once ever have I walked out of the cinema. I remember I went to see Mr and Mrs Smith, and half way through I walked out. Have never seen the end of that film since.

55. My favourite Junk Food is bacon double cheeseburgers! 

56. Due to having acromegaly... every year... without fail... I have to go and get a camera up my ass! Yeah its great being tall(!)

57. I HATE pears. I mean hate them! I hate the texture of them in my mouth, I hate the feel of their skin, I hate EVERYTHING about pears. Even sat here typing this I get goosebumps. If I was trapped on a desert island where all there was to eat was Pears. I would starve to death!

I tag, @themoonglitch @rebelsoulsims @igglemouse and @flowers--girl  and @sparkiemonkey and @alittledaylight do this EPIC tag. If you think you can’t. or done it, or don’t want to cool. 

[tammyhybrid21]

Words on Superheroes

Let’s talk about a trope that people like.

Or rather a concept that people like. Superheroes. Superheroes and superpowers. This comes more or less directly as a result of my brother constantly bursting into my room and discussing it... also as an aside, there’s also the face that Boku no Hero Academia is still somewhat popular. One Punch Man, and everyone still enjoys Marvel and DC so yeah.

Let’s talk about this.

Yeah, this...

So where do I begin... maybe with my own experiences with the trope... which y’know that’s always a good place to begin, whether or not it goes anywhere... so here I go. In my experience, superheroes are just one of those things that has crept into more or less everything... Or at least the concept of beings with otherworldly or otherwise alien/superpowers has crept into more or less everything. Whether it’s your typical super speed, telekinesis or super strength, or even flight, it’s hard to argue that it’s not something that we’re fascinated with.

So, what are my experiences with it...

Well, first off, let’s get the most awkward example out of the way... my Sonic Fandom days... Yes... you heard that right, Sonic Fandom. I uh... went through many phases while I was in Sonic... so you know that’s all good and cool, and...

But yeah.

I’d have to say that Sonic the Hedgehog and his fandom would be what first introduced me properly to the concept of characters with superpowers... before that I was vaguely aware of the superhero fandom, but not really interested in it or anything... I mean, sure there was Spiderman... but... anyway... let’s move onto why this is important...

Furries... And the Furry Fandom...

Yes, I cringe. I cringe because back in the day I was definitely on the fringes of it. Mainly with the Sonic Fandom, which was also where I got into the concept of superpowers, notably superpowered anthros. Because it seemed to be a fandom rule. If you had an OC, they had to have some kind of extra special ability. They couldn’t just be straight forwards...

Which lead to a slew of characters... and well, many of those characters are still around, albeit no longer as Sonic characters... rather... more... general anthro characters. And I’m not really going to talk too much about them... but it is something that I do need to mention... Especially since that’s a concept that I keep returning to in various different iterations as well.

And of course, there’re my surviving OCs who are still around and in use.

Notably, the Fox Triplets, Buziba, and Mana, yeah. Aside those guys, there’s Tony, Zeke, Tamara Alto, The entirety of the Solar and Luna Kingdoms, Vidiarka, Speedy & the rest of the Secret Freedom Fighters... and if I keep going I’m just going to end up with a giant list of characters who you’re going to have no way of decoding or understanding... all you people need to know really is... I have literally hundreds of characters from my Sonic Days...

And the majority of them have some sort of power or other oddity about them. Which alright... I can give my younger self kudos for creativity.

But that’s where I need to get to the point. In the context of the wider universe did it make sense to have over a hundred characters each with their own powers and abilities? Not really... Even as different and as varied as they are... it’s kind of ridiculous looking back that absolutely everyone seems to have some sort of ability...

And sometimes they couldn’t even use them.

Buziba with his telepathy/empathy and the inability to turn it off, Mana literally being time personified in the end... no literally, he was and still is. A small five year old known as the Son of Time... Weak in body, but in spirit and mind-- yeah not so much... And then there was Tai, the ten year old mutt with a “jinx”... And those are the simple ones...

“Simple”

Some like Tamara, my first OC, and kind of obvious self-insert was a bit more complicated with her electrokinesis that also gave her super speed and the ability to absorb electricity and withstand it... Of course I do vaguely recall that she had an upper limit of... I think it was around 50,000 watts? Maybe, I dunno, I can barely remember. And I apparently didn’t have it in her profile... So you know, that was a thing.

That was a thing...

I can’t find the full information on... Aside her, there was her cousin who was a pyrokinetic... and well, her squad of siblings. Who I can vaguely recall all had their own similar vein abilities. Runs in the family and all you know... her slightly younger brother was water, the twins were both earth, Freedom water... she was kind of the odd one out huh... then again fitting...

Of course, Sonic Fandom was also the fandom that spawned my habit of making young characters the most OP things ever--

Mana isn’t the only example of that...

There’s these guys.

These guys... known as the Emerald Children, or the personified Chaos Emeralds... and yes I still have them, and they still look like this. So I should probably give you the basic rundown... But that’s a bit... heh... kind of weird to think about... But for the basic of basic explanations each character had an assigned element and their name vaguely linked them to it.

Scintilla-Energy-Fennec Fox, Ignis-Fire-Chinese Dragon, Alchemy-Light-Gerbil, Hydro-Water-Bottlenose Dolphin, Noctis-Shadows-Honey Badger, Dust-Eartth-Mole and Aero-Air-Masked Owl

Pretty obvious and basic... and since they appeared as kids, of course they were going to be in the Chaos business. They’re kids... how could you expect them to be anything else? Also... I remember having a kind of logic behind their species... But I never really wrote down exactly what that logic was so...

All I’m going to be able to tell you is what their species even are... and before anyone asks... yes they are still those species, and they are still the personification of Chaos Children... Which is still a fun topic... but not one I’m going to get into...

Also these kids... along with Dino, and Inu existed long before Mana...

But you know... I’m not going to talk too much about that, since it’s not really relevant, aside the fact that yeah... really, really young characters with near godlike abilities... Each of them literally personified the element that they were associated with, along with the rest of the power of Chaos...

Which... you know... chaos in Sonic is a little bit ill defined... what even is it? Some kind of magic force, who knows.

It’s chaos we’ll leave it at that.

So... moving on from Sonic, the second fandom that really introduced me to Superheroes as a proper concept was Marvel. Which... actually happened because of a friend of mine. We had this whole concept, a whole story... A whole series actually planned regarding the Marvel universe...

And this is where things get... well weird. You see, I still have all the notes from that whole idea, and it was spawned with some help from the Superpower’s Wiki and the random generator. We both hit the randomize button, twice mind you.. and those were our powers...

If anyone asks, I’m not sure if I’ll answer what mine were but for a small hint of the endgame, the entire thing was to be called Unlikely Balance once it was all done and finished... why is this important...

Because this is where I started to think a hell of a lot more about the concept of powers and the world. At this time, I was still deeply into Sonic and the majority of my OCs were still getting random powers... Sometimes... rather literally.

You see, as a concept Unlikely Balance forced me to stop and actually ask some questions in regards to the world and the characters that we were using, particularly our main trio...

I mean, it was just the two of us who were going to Author it but...

Three main characters.

Genevive Stone/Vidal, Tamika Lore/Mortimer and Lachlan Garvin

And shit... 104 pages worth of discussion and ideas... which... wow... okay... looking at that is very, very intimidating. Especially with the understanding that it started as just us two playing around with the concept of us having powers and then kind of wondering, but what if...

Which lead to a buttload of discussion. And again, it was really the first time I had thought of powers beyond the small perspective of, a character with powers... Since the Marvel Universe really was quite extensive and wild... which meant that we had to figure some things out... especially in regards to how the characters met, whether they knew each other before and in the greater scheme of things what their powers meant...

Of course they begun as just... you know... kids. Kids who had to grow up...

They started the whole series as nine year olds, after all. Which meant we had to really factor in how having those abilities would affect those around them, and what protocols would be followed. How would their families treat them over the abilities and everything--

And I really don’t know if I would be able to really dig through a 104 page document to find all the most important details... Also, by the end it had shifted I remember, from being a Marvel story to potentially an original one... since all that we really needed were our main three characters and the plot.

There was a lot in there actually.

Politics, Laws and the ideas of what exactly is legal for a superhero, and the musings on Secret Identities... to a cult after our main trio because they had a greater destiny due to a time travel screw-up and paradox plot... which... wow-- what a detail to just remember right?

Also there was some stuff about growing up and dealing with that, because of course, they start as kids and the world has some lessons to show them. Which gets into the morality arguments of the whole issue.

Which were huge.

Morality.

Is it right for a superhero to kill, or what?

Which while I won’t go into too much detail... the whole issue is kind of hinted at with their names, along with their ultimate fates... which you know... I’m not going to spoil because there’s the hope that maybe we can or will finagle this into an actual story at some point... maybe.

Who knows?

I mean I sure don’t... right now it’s just a lot of discussion and chaos and well, you know. Needs a lot of sorting...

But on the topic of whether or not it was right to kill villains... well, the two main character’s had what I remember as being somewhat opposing views on death, and whether killing was alright... in fact it spawned a sub-plot where they have to deal with the whole issue... which is kind of funny when it comes down to it because the one who’s more... “morally upright” was the one who was more alright with killing and the one who killed first...

And isn’t that an issue.

But at the same time that’s a huge conflict right there... the plot of an entirely arc... Also I forgot how often a character dies and then comes back to life in this... which is another thing I suppose that I should touch on, but even in context it’s... weird.

Or tricky...

But you know, it was our loophole to deal with how often a superhero would die only to come back... and it was because of clones... Which you know, that’s a perfectly logical explanation one of the trio had the ability to make clones, and those clones would tie to the souls of them, so each time they died, they merely woke up in the body of one of the clones, keeping the experiences...

Which--

Which actually made their ages rather fuzzy if I’m going to be completely honest because the clones didn’t really age from the point that they were first made unless they were disconnected-- which also had a couple of clone villains involved and boy wasn’t that a whole huge mess...

I also don’t remember the order of events as clearly as I would like to-- I mean, I have each arc written but-- well that doesn’t matter as much.

But there was a lot of themes explored in that whole mess, because it wasn’t as simple as here are a bunch of characters with powers go. Unlike in the Sonic Fandom, where it was just... most people seem to have powers for one reason or another... or at least the majority of them do.

So we got into the whole, Mutants, Metas and Aliens-- which alright. There was also time-travel and the exploration of where these powers came from albeit only a base touch down. And since it was Marvel, you can bet we delved into what about the normal human population and all that.

It-- It was heavy.

But ultimately incomplete, and while that did delve into the darker side, it ultimately became just another story about growing up.

Just with superpowers.

Aside that there’s my... Lunia Series.

Which is actually funnily enough a bit of a BNHA story before Boku no Hero Academi-- what if, what if everyone in the world had powers? That was the entirety of the Lunia Series. And... there wasn’t actually all that much more to think about--

Oh

Wait

Actually

The Lunia Series started with one character, and one concept. Like legitimately it started with a character concept of someone with invisibility-- a character who struggled to be seen at all. I mean that was what I started with... and then came the royalty plot, and her “friend” Max-- it grew an awful lot.

And I mean a lot, there’s a whole series-- which actually means I need to stop and talk about this a little bit, because the Lunia Series was my first big project and one of the stories from it... well that was my first year’s NaNoWriMo story...

An absolute mess, I mean I definitely learnt from it... but the issue with that mess, was well-- I got to the word count and hadn’t even hit the first major climax in the story yet. Which okay fair, fair, guess it really was going to be a superhero story-- except Prophecy wasn’t.

It was a story set in the same universe, with another ton of wold-building and ideas like Unlikely Balance... but... You know...

I had a super, super vague idea of the plot for that...

guy writes a fake prophecy so he can run away from the throne, years and years later people are taking it seriously and they think that Ace is the prophecy child, No he's not, Ace decides he has to be and steps up into the role, Prophecy was never real letter found, Chaos, Wait but everything matches it, Ace continues to be Prophecy child... and eventually Rules the country because ??? that's what the prophecy was about...

But beyond that I never had too much of a plot direction it was just Chosen One, Unchosen One, wait he is the real Chosen One playing around with... And a lot of symbolism and doubt and family is super important... with some crossdressing for plot!

Which didn’t translate the best into an actual plot. But it did have so many concepts that I really want to come back to. Because wow, I loved these characters, still love these characters...

But those two stories. Invisibility and Prophecy weren’t the only ones set in that series-- and warning for a specific plotline, regarding Rape and Rape Tropes, but there was a third story called Survivor that I still have the plans for. And this one is where the morals of a society based around superpowers really came into play.

With a lot of questions over self and what constitutes as a crime, and how willing is willing and it was a huge mess. Because some powers muddy the lines, and there’s a huge question in regards to consent and choice...

Which you know, I guess that was something. Also a lot more on the topic of heroes and villains since it was set in a different country from either of the ones that were featured in Invisibility or Prophecy... which actually crossed over a lot closer than one would expect since Tecusa(Invisibility’s Protag) ended up receiving refugees from Dená in the story, refugees that were featured fleeing in Prophecy-- among other crossovers regarding the news and developments in both countries...

And then there was Survivor which was the most set aside of the three.

Taking place in a more traditional Heroes verses Villains setting because that was the way that country was laid out. Nitida, the country of heroes and villains. Set apart from the rest of Lunia by their constant chaos due to that culture... much, much more comic book here--

And then the main character was a rape victim...

Which ahhh... yeah. That was also where I hit that phase, toot toot here come the characters I designed from more or less pure spite because I hated how certain tropes were used and overused... so... I ended up with quite a few character’s who’re kind of-- well.

And no, this isn’t Buziba. Although he falls into the same category. This character was Benjamin “Ben” Chandler... And looking back over my notes... A transboy who’s family accepted him, which alright. Guess younger me had more than a few reasons for why things were happening, but it’s still really, really, really bad.

The execution could always be better.

But that’s why Survivor existed.

To explore those darker things. The crimes that happen, and people don’t want to acknowledge. And Benjamin is a more egregious example, I’ll be real. He’s... not a good character in hindsight, but hey A++ for learning...

Buziba’s a much better character in general and his backstory for it all makes, more sense. But at the same time, I’m not going to lie. My wild boy definitely has more than a few rough spots in his backstory and character that make him something of a cliché/stereotype for this... or at the least, that make the one doing this to him such.

I mean... LOOK AT THIS BOY!

Anyway... Ben did explore another side of the world... and I’m going to leave it at that because honestly. Not much more, to say...

So let’s get into the part of the whole superhero plot that people probably really want to know about, more than stories and themes-- powers.

And what ones I think are more, or less useful. More or less scary. Which ones are the most surprisingly dangerous? Surprisingly tame?

And this--

This is tricky

It really is. Like there are honestly a few powers that no matter what they’re kind of lame, like glowing, but there are others that seem useless, but can be downright terrifying when used in the right, or wrong way. There are some that are just unchanging, and then there are some that sound interesting but always get used in such route and predictable ways...

And then there are the powers that tumblr has gotten it’s claws into and turned into something of pure nightmare fuel by making you stop and think of the greater implications that they imply and the domino affects that they would have. It all matters. It all comes tumbling down. Thankyou tumblr.

But seriously, think about this--

Think about it--

Because how many, how many of these powers have required secondary abilities? If you turn invisible you have to have some other way of seeing things to be able to operate and function in the world to actually be able to live. Super strength and speed both require extra resilience. A healing factor is pretty much required for most powers, by default.

But seriously, how often do people think of these things...

Or the side-effects of healing either...

Aside what Boku no Hero Academia has been doing. Which you know that’s a first, we don’t see the consequences so much. And it messing up your natural healing, that’s good. Really good and interesting. Also... anyone else-- anyone else just generally freaked out by healers in general. You never know exactly where their healing comes from.

Positive or negative.

Also... those who know how to put you back together... typically also know the best way to tear you apart and to absolute shreds. So... you know, fear the healer.

No seriously. Fear. The. Healer.

Fear them.

I want more dangerous healers. Personally, I love my villain healers, villain doctors. Because wow. Break you and remake you. But whatever you know.

I mean, aside that, there’s also that one tumblr post about probability manipulation and wow, wow does that get scary when played a slight bit darker.  But seriously, the general rule for this is really-- really down to creativity. How creative can you be with the powers nothing more nothing less.

I mean I even discussed it with a friend regarding fixing the Power of Three arc in the Warrior Cats series...

Which you know, there is a way to fix that. Although that’s an old cup and in general for Warriors I never got past the first arc and Firestar’s quest so most of what I know is generally, what the fandom puts out more or less... but then I’m the same with most of Naruto because the protagonist just rubs me the wrong way.

But he’s a good example of flaws in a system and disabilities and just... ultimately I don’t know...

But if anyone’s curious about fixing the Three... well, a small thing is it’s kind of spoilers for the vague, extremely vague plan I have regarding my Unbound Unleashed series following Tinderkit-- still, a small hint is the thematics of Mind-Body-Spirit... so do with that information as you will.

Also on that note, special abilities in Warrior Cats in general is an interesting concept, because aside communication with Starclan there is the concept of prophecies and seers, although that’s another pile of prey that I’ll have to get into some other time--

Maybe when my Warrior Cats muse actually returns.

So yeah...

I think that’s all I can really say on superpowers. There’s a lot to say, but I don’t really have much that I can cohesively piece together when I’m just kind of gushing and babbling to fill up my word count for NaNoWriMo, since this month is meant to be vent... so...

Yeah, done.

[whydidireadthis]

Dark Reign...a brief look.

Events.

The word alone is enough to make a superhero comic reader fight their understandable gag reflex.

In the 80s, confronted with a capricious market, the genre powerhouses Marvel and DC experimented with “events” -- limited crossovers of numerous characters for a singular storyline. DC had been doing this annually as a tradition, typically between the Justice League and the Justice Society. However, their company crossovers were cranked up to eleven around the mid-80s, and Marvel decided to give it a try.

Both companies decided that events were the thing of the future. The main reason for this is because they could very easily make series seem to tie into the main crossover’s storyline and, thus, wring out a few more bucks from hapless readers who didn’t know any better. It’s also worthy of note that this same initial period is the period where the expression “red-sky crossover” comes from.

If you didn’t know what that meant, it means “a book advertised as being a part of an event that only includes some superficial aspect of it”, which specifically refers in its name to the many “crossovers” of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Many had nothing really to do with the main story, which was ridiculously dense and a massive clusterfuck that could have used decompression into other books; instead, the labeled “crossover” would feature something like the red sky from the main Crisis books and have someone comment on it, then the rest of the story continued on as normal.

Classy.

But after that little bit of setup, let me just segue into saying that Civil War was the event to end all events. And by that, I mean it was the absolute nadir for the superhero genre and unequivocally the worst “event” ever conceived, figuratively and literally destroying countless characters and making it impossible to repair the genre into what it should be: super-powered champions in iconic costumes fighting back against evil, villainy, and oppression.

Days of Future Crap

Civil War took an old, tired X-Men plot (which was probably why the X-Men were largely absent from it) and decided to rehash it one more time, except worse somehow. And as much as I hate the “Marvel cinematic universe”, I have to admit -- without it coming along to build some characters back up, they would have been completely and utterly unusable after Civil War made them into nasty little fascists...the exact thing most superheroes love to punch right in the face, for good reason.

But after Civil War tore the real Marvel Universe apart, alienated longtime readers in droves, and brought extremely short-lived sales boosts that petered off almost instantly, Marvel found themselves stuck for what to do. Eventually, they went with the sure bet of Skrull fuckery, because Skrulls could change shape. That worked, right? Sure! Even if it did completely ignore or contradict decades of established continuity in so doing, as with garbage -- which you would rightly clock as garbage from the title alone -- like Skrull Kill Krew.

And after the yawn that was Secret Invasion, which was basically just an excuse for more graphic violence and “shocking” twists, then came the brusque push into Dark Reign.

In many ways, Dark Reign kind of exemplifies the worst tendencies of the superhero genre since 2000, that period of over-the-top violence and flagrant disrespect for beloved characters and teams, but also tries to include some genuinely good ideas and concepts. There’s good stuff in there, which is far more than anyone could say about, for example, Civil War or Secret Invasion.

Unfortunately for Dark Reign, it also stuck around just short of for-fucking-ever, and it gave us remarkably little in return for our investment of time. And money, because over 200 issues, at a very reserved estimate, carried the Dark Reign tie-in label.

And that’s really its biggest problem: it was an idea that was conceived with no scope in mind. Marvel editorial wanted, they claimed, to get away from the concept of “events” as essentially limited series storylines with tie-ins, which came and went relatively quickly.

Well cry me a fucking river, since they started that shit in the mid-80s and rode it for over twenty years while readers complained every god damn time an “event” came along and derailed the story and characters to tell its comparatively stupid one.

Ahem. But I digress. The main problem was that Dark Reign was an event, without actually being an event. It’s a lot like my feelings about superhero stories that are totally superhero stories, they know they’re superhero stories, but they act like they’re too good to admit that and look down on superhero stories, constantly sniping at and avoiding genre staples out of contempt. Fuck you. Call a spade a spade. You’re not some amazing auteur because you wrote Superman without a costume.

And that’s really the big problem here: in trying to avoid making Dark Reign seem like the usual type of event, it’s a vague, nebulous mass of barely-related issues where the villains of the piece may only pop in at one point to twirl their moustaches, and nothing can actually be accomplished because, at the end of the day, it is an event and its plot will not advance until the event is resolving. It’s virtually impossible to figure out where the story starts, where it advances, and there’s no real order to it. Multiple would-be authorities on the subject have put forth their proposed reading orders, but it’s all conjecture at this point. The only order you have is when there is a limited series specifically tied in to the event (and there were several) or when an already-running series has tie-in issues that go in sequential order.

What makes it even more complicated and frustrating is when you have tie-ins only sometimes. For example, with the then-running series of War Machine, issues 1-5 and then 10-12 are the only ones considered part of Dark Reign. They’re the ones that directly pertain to the Dark Reign plot. But there are a lot of times in the various series where the issues with the Dark Reign label cut off before any real resolution...making it either poor organization or just poor planning. Some series, like War Machine, just abruptly end with the end of that tie-in, as if that was the only thing keeping them going. In War Machine’s case, that may have been true.

But it’s a huge mess. Even if you were to decide “oh hey, I’ll just grab the trade paperbacks, that’ll be easier to read them in order”...not really. Sure, it’s all collected, and in order. But not always a coherent order, and not always including all of the parts of the story that you need to have it actually make sense.

For example, one of the high points of Dark Reign is the X-Men leaving San Francisco and establishing an independent sovereign island nation of Utopia. However, for whatever reason, it’s ridiculously difficult to find any of those issues included in any collection. Maybe it’s Marvel’s stupid rights mismanagement with the X-Men and Fantastic Four, but it’s just as likely to be a really tremendous lack of organization with regards to the event.

And I’m not giving them a free pass on this, either; the Utopia storyline suffers from terrible inconsistent characterization and oftentimes, just painfully bad writing, like Daken’s inexplicable voiced contempt for female fighters...which had not previously appeared and never popped up again afterwards. It had some great moments too, though, like Emma making a strong showing but still remembering that she had a heart and feelings, as well as being an excellent strategist and tactician. It was also nice to see that Sentry, for all his overblown bullshit, wasn’t a match for Namor and Rogue, on the rare occasion she’s written well, is able to hold her own against serious heavy hitters.

But I’ll come back to the Sentry later. Oh yes. He’s not getting out of this unscathed.

The Un-Crossovers for the Un-Event

The thing is, everything feels adrift in a sea of crossover labels. Oh, this book’s part of Dark Reign! Well that’s cool...too bad it doesn’t have much context beyond the basic premise of the event, and almost nothing in any story ever seems to have any consequences or repercussions beyond that individual story! It’s this feeling of futility that really makes it hard to enjoy Dark Reign, especially since it was conceived with no scope in mind. They really wanted it to feel less like an event, and more like just something happening in the world of the characters. And that’s cool and everything, but...

It doesn’t work.

The reason why events even work at all is because, love it or hate it, once it’s over, things are going to continue on without having to tie into it. People will be relieved, they’ll pick their series back up, and they won’t be constantly bothered with some extraneous story that doesn’t focus on the character or team they really care about. Plus, the company can compile the event into a couple of trade paperbacks and wring a little more profit from them, since that’s why they did the event in the first place anyway.

When you have an event so nebulous and yet so ubiquitous, it really shows the weakness of the event mindset. Stories function better when the villains, who are built up as being detestable -- you want to see the heroes get one up on them, you want to see the big bad guy punched in the gut and brought low -- are defeated before they become too much and it just becomes depressing and miserable.

When a story drags on for over a year, readers become used to it. It becomes a new normal, and that’s a depressing reality, especially when the villains are constantly being built up for readers to hate them. You have to give readers something, and that something increases in scope with every evil, detestable act the villains commit. You have to balance it out with victories, even small ones, so that hope can be maintained and it doesn’t become a drudgy slog.

And I’ll say this too: Alan Moore was right in the fundamental message of Watchmen. Which I will also say I hated as a story, I think it’s overrated miserable crap, and it’s fodder for the endlessly pretentious to harp on when they think they’re too good for superhero comics. Like I said before: fuck you. Call a spade a spade and be done with it.

But the fundamental message was this: it’s better for superheroes to fight supervillains than it is for there to be no superheroes or villains, because then all you’ve got are politicians and shitty regular humans constantly trying for a pathetic little bit of what they think is power over each other.

And fundamentally, we read superhero comics not to see bureaucracy, politics, or the inherent shittiness of people. We read them because they are a modern mythology, of heroes we vicariously identify with, whom we join on their adventures through the medium of comics. We see them at their high and low points. We join them in their moments of tragedy and triumph both, and we delight in those highs and understand those lows.

When we are enjoying superhero comics, we can fly above any unhappiness or inadequacy that our real lives give us, and in those moments, we are invincible. It is because of this that superhero fans are so passionate about their heroes.

There has always been some element of things like government and military shit in superhero comics. The fact that they really kindled as a genre during World War II is not lost on me. But since shortly after 2000, Marvel tried really hard to militarize superheroes and brought in a heavy governmental angle too. SHIELD was promoted and became more overblown than it was in the age of the superspy. Suddenly, everything had to revolve around one or the other, and it was not a wise or welcome turn.

So I will say this for Dark Reign: it illustrated very well, especially in tie-in storylines like Avengers: The Initiative, why militarized superheroes and government lies are not a good thing to have around. Sure, we shouldn’t need to have it spelled out for us, but it’s nice to have that precedent set that no, superheroes shouldn’t be government-controlled, no matter who is in power, because even if we have an administration that isn’t overtly malevolent, that won’t last. Inevitably, someone will get power that doesn’t deserve it, which is something especially painful to say in this day and age.

But having Norman Osborn be constantly, repeatedly built up to be even more of a piece of total shit than we already knew him to be...was a huge mistake. Because we knew that, despite everything, despite Marvel’s tendency for that 2000s “kill-’em-all” attitude and despite their unending contempt for readers, shown very well with Civil War alone...

We knew nothing was going to come of it.

We knew Norman Osborn was going to get the easy way out, survive the whole ordeal, and be locked away somewhere until someone wanted to bring him back as the Green Goblin or something.

And you can’t do that with this kind of storyline.

You can’t make it a shitty, real world-feeling storyline like this, mired in politics, bureaucracy, militaristic bullshit, and the bad guys winning, not to mention taking things way too far in tone with everything from rape to cannibalism, and not have the big bad guy die to resolve it.

You cannot, with the unlimited scope of superhero comics, leave someone like that alive. They have caused, directly or indirectly, horrific things to happen, and they committed crimes that are completely inexcusable; if you want them to stick around, if they’re the kind of “love to hate them” villain, then you have to do less to make them the kind of person that even the best and most heroic would say “yeah, nothing of value would be lost if you just offed that guy.”

Because it’s pretty fucking unsatisfying and pretty god damn smug when you try to have the good guys act like they’re the better people for not just ending evil -- and this is a fictional evil, so it’s absolutely, completely, and objectively evil -- but every reader of every age knows that doesn’t do anything at all to fix the things that person did. It doesn’t bring back people from the dead, it doesn’t undo their trauma, it doesn’t heal their injuries. It doesn’t repair the damage done to the world at large.

When you have someone who essentially steals a position of great power and influence, they must have absolute accountability. Which...is also pretty relevant to modern life, but painful to have to spell out.

The thing is, with Dark Avengers, they could have balanced this out a bit. The characters in that series (who were almost invariably as written completely different people in any other series) were pretty fucked-up, but they were often treated as more nuanced, three-dimensional people, with only a couple of exceptions. I’m looking at you, Sentry.

In Dark Avengers, even the team of villains and grey area antihero types didn’t know how to deal with Norman. Which was a bit stupid, since any one of them probably could have destroyed him effortlessly, but it made for a more psychological conflict. Unfortunately, the glue holding it together was the Sentry...one of Marvel’s worst characters and worst character ideas, who comes off as a bad idea somebody had while stoned, but who became a high-profile character anyway.

He’s not altogether the worst idea ever, but he’s up there. Conceptually, it’s pretty interesting to examine a high-powered superhero everyone somehow forgot about, but in actual execution, the Sentry is just a crazy twat. He’s impossible to like, he’s uninteresting because he’s overpowered, and nobody knows how to write him well, because his fundamental premise is one of not understanding his character. It’s obvious that whoever thought up the Sentry was someone who didn’t understand how to write Superman, didn’t know what made Superman great as a character, and thought it was ludicrous that such a character could exist in the Marvel Universe.

But it’s not. There are cosmic-level characters all over Marvel’s whole cosmos. And while superheroes are all about the action, that’s not all there is to them. How hard a character can punch something isn’t really what the character should be about, despite superheroics tending to revolve around resolving problems with fighting and powers. If you don’t have a context for those fights, it’s just meaningless, hollow visuals. If a character doesn’t have a motivation to do something that tells you something about that character, you probably won’t care about that character.

How hard does Superman punch? As hard as he needs to. How much can he lift? As much as he needs to. What can he do? As much as he needs to. That’s why Superman is an excellent character who has stood the test of time, and the Sentry is a terrible character who only pops up when people think they have something clever they can do with him.

His function in Dark Avengers, as in Dark Reign, is Norman’s imagined ace in the hole. He uses Sentry as a bully, to just casually destroy anyone or anything that gets in his way, and he constantly holds that threat over everyone...except when the story needs him not to do that, which it does often. Sentry is fairly easy to take out, but when it matters, he’s impossible to get rid of, and for no reason that really develops him as a character or makes him more interesting. He’s a schizophrenic idiot and contributes essentially nothing to the story. He is a placeholder until or unless he’s used as a deus ex machina, when he becomes insufferable because he’s nothing but a crutch for weak writing.

The worst and most glaring part of it is that Norman is batshit crazy, and it’s frankly unbelievable that he is somehow able to handle the Sentry, by using Sentry’s crazy against him. It’s just unbelievable, and it’s ridiculous that it goes on as long as it does -- a year, which in superhero comics is an eternity.

Sentry has no pathos and no real levels to him. All the depth he has is manufactured, artificial, and wholly “who cares” at every point. The one series that ever managed to make me care about him was the whimsical series The Age of the Sentry, done in a spirit of fun and real, palpable love for bygone eras of comics, and that was a series of stories told about the character and of dubious veracity.

In Dark Reign, he’s written like Superman when Superman is badly written: a crutch to quickly resolve stories the writer has no idea how to get himself out of, or alternatively the one that has to be taken out as soon as possible because the writer can’t write, usually because he wants to show that the person doing it is a serious threat. Either way, it doesn’t work.

Cul-de-Sac Reign

In a similarly dead-end sort of way, most of the tie-in stories are nothing but plot cul-de-sacs. They can’t actually advance the plot appreciably until editorial wants it to advance...so instead, they just end up being prolonged exercises in futility.

For the same reason I hated The X-Files, in which the protagonists were constantly prevented from accomplishing anything by increasingly ridiculous plot devices, I hate pointless stories. The Young Avengers miniseries is pointless, for introducing characters who all but came from nowhere and vanished back there, in a worthless plot where characters were inspired into complete inaction despite having a resolution to the entire event available. Similarly, the Elektra miniseries takes the widely-hated horrible joke of a character, makes her somehow more unlikable, and wastes everyone’s time with a story that goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing but character destruction, mainly of Elektra and Wolverine.

Who is, by the way, now absolutely complicit in multiple premeditated murders of people justifiably pissed off at Elektra being a complete piece of shit. Not that they bring this up with any of the gravity it should have -- just look at any time Rick Remender writes Wolverine or, for that matter, anyone in any series. Or don’t. No one should have to read Remender’s pretentious garbage.

Even the Punisher, whom I can’t stand, is dicked around by Dark Reign’s insistence to avoid having things happen. It’s pretty shitty when multiple issues of his title advertised him going after various members of the Dark Avengers to take them down, and he wasn’t even able to make any significant impact with anything he did. He couldn’t even take down Norman, who had no believable excuse for being able to escape mortal danger! You know, for all I give superhero comics shit for killing off characters needlessly, having the Punisher actually take out Norman -- or Sentry -- would have actually been shocking, and that could have led to so much more interesting conflicts and storylines about what this means, if it was right if the other heroes were thinking about it (and they were), and they could have had the Dark Avengers scrambling to try and hold onto their legitimacy and almost make it...but be defeated by the good guys, who prove their goodness and show the public what they bought into.

And can we just talk about the animal cruelty that popped up from time to time? It seemed really overt and conspicuous, and it’s absolutely not okay. Extreme violence is never okay, even in superhero comics (or maybe especially in superhero comics), but animal cruelty is really going a step past a step past too far.

Get your shit together, Marvel.

To say nothing of the inherent lameness of the Hood, probably the absolute worst character to be introduced and featured prominently in these past couple of decades of superhero disaster. It’s some lame whiner of a shit garbage character that dresses in everyday clothes but wears a red cloak over it and, of course, dual wields guns. Because that doesn’t look stupid or anything. And of course his background is basically the one thing I despise more than almost anything else in tired-ass writing cliches: straight people baby daddy issues. Please go fuck yourself. Nobody cares about the asshole who knocked up some bint who shit out a kid and became a by-the-numbers deadbeat dad. Because they’re lame.

The underlying basic concept, that of someone finding a magical cloak that gives them powers, is wondrous and fun. It’s just that the Hood himself is the exact opposite of wondrous and fun. He comes off, every time, like some asinine mary sue author insertion character you hate the moment they’re introduced. It’s cool when Doctor Doom shows that he’s not only a scientific genius, he’s also a skilled sorceror. It’s not so cool when some asshole dumbasses his way through magical power because of some cape he found randomly that anyone could have found.

It makes him seem even worse, and even more of a character almost metaplot levels of desperate to intimidate that he keeps trying to spook the people around him because they don’t take him seriously. Here’s an idea: create an imposing costume. If you can’t do that, you really can’t expect to be taken seriously. If you can’t even make imposing fashion choices or bring together an ensemble that will impact others, you have no business expecting them to just take you at face value because you’re wearing a red cape that you have matched with literally nothing else you’re wearing.

Plot, Unmoving

But none of it really adds anything to Dark Reign, and it really pisses me off to see stories where direct resolution was available, but heroes couldn’t actually do what they would logically or reasonably do...because editorial wanted to stretch out the event to make it seem like it wasn’t an event.

The whole concept of “Dark Avengers” is made even more stupid by the fact that they’re wearing obviously outdated costumes. As cool as Moonstone looks in Ms. Marvel’s old outfit, she also looks like she just stepped out of a disco. And while the different lineups of Avengers have sometimes been really strange and seemingly random over the years, you can’t expect me to believe that literally nobody noticed how awkward this one was, and how their costumes were almost all completely out of date and out of touch with the figures who are well-known public figures.

There’s also this weird aversion to the actual heroes confronting the people masquerading as them, because Norman’s good at PR spin. I’m sorry?! This just doesn’t make sense, and it keeps making less sense when some of the heroes are actually willing to strike out on their own to kill Norman, rather than to actually make it public that they are being impersonated...which makes it even more ridiculous when you consider that some of the people being impersonated have public identities.

The Dark X-Men team was actually was more plausible, in large part because much of the public didn’t know the X-Men well, and also because there actually was an actual X-Man in the group. Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to have Wolverine really in the Dark Avengers, and maybe have the X-Men or some other group have to work with his dangerous and unpredictable son Daken to get one over on him and take him out, thereby reducing the power level of the team significantly?

But no, they couldn’t have that. The X-Men had to have their own inane events, and Wolverine, despite being a dumpster fire of a character at this point, is somehow sacrosanct for vicarious dick-waggling of insecure writers who live through him just like the same pack of wankers do for Batman.

There’s also this bizarre insistence that somehow, despite people overtly getting plenty of proof that the “Dark Avengers” aren’t who they say they are, and some of them are committing pretty serious crimes in costume, in a day and age where everyone has a camera and a microphone and there’s recording everywhere...nobody gets any real dirt on them until they write it into Spider-Man for Peter Parker to do it.

I think it’s great Peter does it. But at the same time...how exactly is it that a top-level investigative journalist isn’t able to do it for a small eternity, and how exactly is it that it doesn’t have more serious repercussions in the public eye? It may just be the chaotic nature of the incoherent narrative, and I’m just not seeing it in any sort of cohesive order, but it sure seems like one of the many plot elements that doesn’t really matter until editorial decides it suddenly has any bearing on anything.

And I’ll just address the elephant in the room: the Dark Avengers lineup is not, to be totally honest, the most powerful or able he could have assembled. Most of them being mentally unstable doesn’t exactly help the plausibility. Given, the Marvel Universe tends towards more street power level and less cosmic, but there are plenty of real hard hitters that have been in the Avengers’ membership over the years, not to mention their foes that a villain supposedly so resourceful should have been able to recruit.

It’s basically just a sort of take on the Masters of Evil or the Sinister Six or something. And I have to say again that having an actual hero, or even a fallen hero desperate for redemption, would be a vast improvement. Instead, we only have elements like that in side stories or tie-ins that go nowhere and are easily missed by the central narrative.

Additionally, Norman Osborn is not the most believable as a long-term leader, even if he does use strongarm tactics, blackmail, and manipulation to get his way. He’s just not that smart, certainly not as much as he’d have to be in order to keep his team of people together and not killing him, and incidentally avoiding anyone else outside the team and thus his control similarly killing him. This is where I’ll bring Doctor Doom up again, since when he gathered a group of people together, he had a damn good reason and, as a reader, you could believe he could actually control them...or at the very least, keep them from posing a serious mortal threat to him.

Members of the Dark Avengers fight other teams and heroes, but rarely do they ever bother to clash en masse with any other group to any narrative end. There’s such a feeling of futility that pervades it all, that if you read any story supposedly tying into it, you start to expect it to go nowhere and accomplish nothing. Because even if it seems to actually make a difference, everything it does is either handwaved, ignored, or somehow doesn’t work into the next story you read under the Dark Reign banner.

Dark Reign is an event, make no mistake. It has a central storyline that we should be seeing unfold with every tie-in and every crossover. Instead, Marvel’s complete aversion to admitting what it is leaves us with a meandering, disjointed tale that promises something unique and superior and instead leaves us thinking of what it could have been, and probably should have been, instead.