Commentary

Yes I'm putting on airs, naming a post after Jeff Cooper's random thoughts column, but here's some random thoughts—albeit with less meandering about falconry.

• I remain convinced that the English only tolerate Dr. Who because it's not from here; they're so hard-up for any not-shitty-looking TV that wasn't made by us, they'll even settle for that. And then, basically, most of the American fans do the same thing, because there really are self-hating Americans who think Britain is better at everything. No, I know, "Their welfare system is actually worse than ours is(!), and a few of us can actually cook a foxtrotting cabbage," and so on. But there really are such people.
  
  Anyway, I realized, the pacifist hero is much more popular in Japanese and British work than here in the US. It's obviously because Americans haven't cocked up the use of force nearly as much, but I think there are differences; the British were never militarists the way the Japanese were, and they were also never Buddhist. But one thing you'll soon notice, if you consume a lot of manga and anime, is that the Japanese pacifist heroes suffer for it. Vash the Stampede gets the ever-loving shit kicked out of him, and even Goku and Naruto have trouble because they don't kill people like Vegeta (hey, Vegeta killed a lot of Nameks, and he also came damn close to killing Kuririn, Gohan, and Buruma, too).
  
  But the Doctor? Shit no. His enemies are always morons, and oh yeah, he's basically a demigod, who can always bluff or flirt his way out of danger, or magically produce some nonsense device from a fourth-dimensional pocket, like some black-market knockoff Doraemon. Fundamentally I think it's related to how Japan may have a pacifist constitution, but they also have the third or fourth highest defense spending in the world—after America and whichever other superpower thinks it might fight America. The British are, fundamentally, Jingoes; they believe they are invincible. The more left-wing they are—and the BBC makes the American media look Tsarist by comparison—the more Jingo they are, that's why they favor defense cuts. The idea that the good guy—who is, inexplicably, British, or at least played by one, in open defiance of all but the most recent historical trends—might actually have to suffer for his ideals, is nonsense to them.


• Speaking of Jingoes, you know what's fascinating? There is this odd attitude, among both the British and Americans of Anglo ethnicity, that they get to forgive other people. Excuse me? Who, precisely, has asked for your forgiveness? Not France, not Spain, and most certainly not the Catholic Church; you animals are the ones who do the apologizing, where those people are concerned.
  
  I don't know where you got the impression you were sitting in some pure-white throne of judgment, but the fact of the matter is, the only words you have the right to say to any of the above is "We're sorry we're thieves, rapists, liars, and murderers." Because newsflash, shitheads, that's what you are. You're not being "tolerant" when you merely are not anti-Catholic, anymore than it's "tolerance" when Germans avoid anti-Semitism. Indeed, the British were far and away the most vile human-rights abusers in the Western world, until Nazi Germany finally edged them out, and that by far too narrow a margin.


• On to cheerier things, what the hell is with Alphas, on the Syphilis Channel? One, and I know this is a novel idea, how about having female characters the audience prefers aren't murdered? Two, I don't mind myself, but the black guy gets super-strength from getting angry—seriously? Three, bullshit Homo superior/next stage of human evolution, as explanation for powers, is, well, bullshit. And done before, and better. Most of the powers are basic parapsychology things, how about the lackwit writers actually do some research, and explain the powers that way?
  
  Four, the villain is Magneto. Sure, he's not got magnet powers; still Magneto. Five, mean ol' normal humans fear the (potentially dangerous) Homo superior and want legislation to protect themselves and this is apparently bad and the crippled private school principle psychologist goes and testifies to someone, about something: been done. Sucked then too. Come up with another plot, the Civil Rights era is over. Most people nowadays who talk about equal rights are defiling the memory of Civil Rights leaders for personal gain, and often for the express purpose of establishing tyranny.
  
  Finally, again, if a guy has innate abilities as dangerous as technological weapons, then in justice he can be regulated as closely as the equivalent weapon. The race analogy doesn't work, so don't raise it: black people cannot knock over skyscrapers with their minds.


• A cool idea in Niven is the Thrint. Specifically, they are stupid telepaths. Why? Because their brains only evolved to be complex enough for telepathy, and then they stopped getting smarter...and got more telepathic.
  
  I'm not saying you have to have your telepaths be stupid—I can think of several ways around that idea, e.g. that telepathy is inextricably bound up with raw computing power—but you have to put at least that much thought into your aliens.


• You know how people always say "Oh it's unrealistic that aliens always invade/contact X city", where X city is a major city of the region that produced the show?
  
  Yeah, well they even say it about anime. Only, mightn't aliens seek out the most densely-populated urban center, for contact or attack? Well that's Tokyo.


• Some lady, associated with some vidyagame blogger, was giving Twilight the business, but one of the things she complained about was nonsense: it's really fairly irrelevant what time of year the story takes place in, as an independent fact. Yes, I look up when Hecate's Night is for my werewolf story, and what the position of Venus was relative to Ursa Major (it has to do with Aztec astrology), but I'm a crazy person, and whole swaths of my research never sees print: at no point in my SF book do I mention that the characters' ship enters the solar system on October 17, 2342, but that's the date I used to calculate the planets' positions.
  
  As if, however, you needed another reason to love orbit elevators, how about the fact they go on the equator? No seasons on the equator, therefore (unless the planet's orbit takes it through a debris field twice a year, or something), the time of year is demonstrably irrelevant.


• I have been remiss; ages ago, I mentioned that some Eastern European vampires, though they don't burn in sunlight, turn to stone in it, and crumble to dust. And someone asked for the source.
  
  Honestly, I don't remember well; I know I've encountered it in stories, but not what stories. I think it might've been a book on Transylvanian folklore at my local library. It might've been the anthropology monographs I read for fun in the college library when I was at Northern Arizona University (yes that's my idea of a good time).
  
  I think my explanation—bleedover from Greek goblins—may be some private theory of my own. The plague of the student of vampire folklore, after all, is that vampires get adulterated with every other magical creature in the universe, from witches to werewolves to zmei (Romanian ogres whose name is a Slavic word for dragon and frequently gets used as a catch-all for "spooks"), to goblins. That last is important, because Greek goblins, the kalikantzari, turn to stone and crumble to dust in sunlight, and lots of Balkan folklore borrows Greek elements.
  
  If you needed another example of how folklore critters don't stay distinct, by the way, "kalikantzari" comes from centaur*, of all things.


• I was reading some other blogs by the person who was critiquing Twilight, and she was talking about translation. She said that she was watching a Bollywood film, and apparently in Hindi one calls people "sister", "brother", and "uncle" as terms of respect; she said that would've confused her, if she hadn't known Japanese does that.
  
  Only, what? Certain strains of Evangelicalism do it, black Americans do it (probably due to being of those strains of Evangelicalism), freaking Sam Axe in Burn Notice does it. It exists within English, in other words. Can one truly be so bizarrely provincial as not to have encountered fictive kinship before? It's in Lord of the Rings, it's in actual epics, it's in Shakespeare—you'd pretty much have had to sleep through all of high school English not to encounter the thing.
  
  Interestingly, speaking of, the ambiguity exists within cultures that have it; frequently in manga one will encounter the "Oh, that guy's your real brother? I thought he was just a childhood friend or something."


• A bunch of people, who are obviously not readers of comics that actually exist, claim that Superman is boring, because he's so powerful. Heh. Actually, no, leaving to one side that him and Bats do a great manzai act in every Justice League comic, Big Blue has a type of drama that's refreshingly innovative, given the "mewling weakling protagonist" school that's dominated literature for the last 40 years. Namely, he has the ability to turn anyone who looks at him sideways into a fine pink mist, and he refuses to do it.
  
  Given their portrayal of high school gym class, we can guess why those writers find weakling characters more identifiable, but the near-deity who forbears to use his strength is an entirely valid dramatic choice—and one that DC generally pulls off with aplomb, in Superman comics. After all, his powers don't actually give him the things he wants—like Krypton still existing or Pa Kent not (usually) being dead, for instance, or, until comparatively recently, Lois loving him for who he is—and, again, he refuses to be a killer. Lex Luthor is actually his nemesis, despite having no superpowers at all, because he won't use his obvious advantages. You can say that's a foolish choice on Kal's part, but if it is, so is Batman's refusal to off the Joker—and Lex doesn't murder people to set up a punchline.
  
  God, you have me defending Superman, and me a GL man. Damn you, Internet stupidity, damn you to hell.