Super! Heroes and . . . well, me
When I think back to the stories I used to play in my imagination before the age of my heroine Maggie Stuart in The Last Rite, what I am struck by most intensely is the assumption that I, my character anyhow, was somehow special.
Special how? That I had powers, or some kind of strange and exotic background, or that I was somehow very valuable to someone or in some crisis that only I had the key to solve.
My early stories are all peppered with this belief, that like Frodo the reluctant ring-bearer in The Lord of the Rings, I was the sole person capable of fulfilling the particular destiny laid upon me. That I, in fact, was essential to both the story and the greater scheme of the world at large.
I don’t think I got how wonderful a feeling of being necessary was until that feeling started to go away. Around Maggie’s age, thirteen, my fantasies often were leavened with a kind of frustration, that I didn’t fit and had no comfortable although difficult path to follow. I imagined I was a changeling child of parents from another world or dimension, and that here in this place I not only had no real place, but no ability to understand where I came from either. I was without a real identity. I remember lying on the back patio of our house, sleeping out under the stars, and imagining a birthmark on my hand that would light up when my real people were on their way to get me. It was melancholy, and, I know, such a common feeling — not fitting in, not knowing my place.
It was more and more difficult through my teen years to imagine stories in which I was a comfortable hero, or did comfortably heroic things. It seemed like I knew too much about the other side of every act to be gloriously and confidently heroic. My characters doubted their own abilities, doubted their reading of situations, and longed for a place that they could be the hero whil watching others do the things they could only dream of.
Lately, though, I’ve come to a different perspective, and have opened myself back up to heroic imaginings, just a little. One thing I’ve had some fun with is to treat the heroic genre with the respect and courtesy I lost to some extent by feeling like I was excluded from it, and write some straight-ahead genre fiction in which the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and evil and good are as black and white as chess pieces. Provided your chessboard is made up of black and white pieces.
It’s astonishingly refreshing to pretend for a little that moral ambiguity and gray areas don’t exist, if only for a little while. And sometimes there’s nothing as satisfying as writing a truly snarling bastard of a villain.
I’ve also taken a couple of forrays into a more satirical vein, the one I’m enjoying most being The Inner Life of Owl Woman in which a superheroine details the non-glamourous everyday life of a working-for-good girl:
from The Inner Life of Owl Woman
Moody? Yeah, I know one hero who fits that. I won’t name him, naturally, but suffice it to say that he broods a lot and wears a big black cape. No, not him. He’s actually a pretty decent guy. I chalk up the whole maladjusted introverted persona rap to bad press.
No, the guy I mean gives off this choir-boy image, but to his intimates, he’s known as the Poet. Not because he’s a writer or anything, but because in his secret identity, he favours dark turtlenecks, berets, and a perma-sulk. This guy is a downer. And get him on to shop talk, and he’s even worse.
Everything, to him, is a sign of how much worse things are getting every year. He can quote violent crime statistics for the last half millennium. The only thing he can’t do is tell you when things were ever any better.
So he’s a walking contradiction. It’s worse now than it’s ever been, but it’s always been as bad as it is. I don’t get it. I thought caped crusaders were supposed to make the world a better place. He gets me second-guessing myself, wondering if I’m not as high-minded and moral as I think, and am really just working out my anti-social violent tendencies on an unremittently corrupt society.
But what was it one of Isaac Asimov’s characters used to say? ‘Never let your morals stand in the way of doing what’s right.’ That’s it to a T. Only maybe in my case I should exchange ‘your morals’ for ‘the law.’ Hmm.
You can continue on below to the archived blog from July 9, 2005 inspired by the original “Fantastic Four” movie.
