This Is Something Trek Fans Have Been Arguing About Since Discovery Was Announced. While The High Production

Damned right.

Regardless of what cynics still resentful of their 11th grade English class experience might tell you, you’re allowed to identify with Holden. You’re allowed to root for Heathcliff. You’re allowed to feel gooey over Romeo and Juliet. 

We got over the idea that literature was meant to always reflect reality and to offer moral instruction a long time ago. Interacting with all the gross, ugly, embarrassing, and/or destructive emotions we encounter in books is part of the reason they’re there.

Maybe I was just at the wrong age when I finally began reading them, but I never got into LoEG, and I think a lot of the above explains why. Heck, I’m still steamed over what Moore did with the Maschinenmensch (a.k.a. “false Maria) in The Roses of Berlin.

What do you dislike about league of extraordinary gentlemen?

Short answer: What I dislike about the comic is the same thing comic fans disliked about the movie- it turned my favorite characters into caricatures.

Long answer:

Make up your mind, Alan Moore- is the League okay with rape or not?  It’s horrifying when Hyde or Bond do it, but they first come across the Invisible Man in the process of raping children and basically laugh it off.

Bull-freaking-shit would Jonathan dump Mina over having ugly scars.  If you really needed to get him out of the way to hook Mina up with your preferred guy, why not just kill him off and have Mina angst over his death Gwen Stacy-style?

If Jonathan did ever dump Mina for her scars, Van Helsing would be waiting outside the house with a baseball bat (for Jonathan’s kneecaps) and a bouquet of flowers (in case Mina wanted to trade up.)

Why did Mina fall in love with Alan Quartermain?  I’m not opposed to younger woman/older man pairings, but…why?  Some amount of looks can be traded for some amount of personality or vice versa, but Quartermain as written by Moore had neither.

Why did Moore’s idea of “strong female character” mean “take a woman who was canonically kind and make her a straw feminist ice queen”?

If Jekyll became Hyde because he was ashamed of being gay, then why the everloving hell was Hyde into women?

People Alan Moore cannot do pastiches of: Shakespeare, P.G. Woodehouse, Jack Kerouac.

Pirate Jenny canonically (insofar as a throwaway song is canon) became murderous over doing humiliating menial work.  This was not enough for Alan Moore- she had to be raped, because that’s the only possible reason a woman would become a supervillain.

Since he’d already made her Indian, if he wanted her to have additional motivation to be mad, couldn’t it have been about racism?

I don’t like what he did with James Bond, but defending James Bond really isn’t the hill I want to die on.  Suffice it to say that it felt mean-spirited.

Speaking of mean-spirited, what does Alan Moore have against Harry Potter and Peter Rabbit?

If you’re going to write a series of comics that amount to “look how much better I am than these other sexist, racist authors!” then your comic should be 1) actually better, and 2) not sexist or racist.

Neil Gaiman goes on about how the movie adaptation was the first time everyone agreed the movie sucked and the comic was great, and it annoys me because I *don’t* agree that the comic was great.

In fact, that’s a big part of why it all pisses me off- I feel like I’m supposed to love this comic.  I spent years trying to love this comic.  I do not love this comic.

Now, do I think you can do this kind of critique well?  Yes, and I’ll point to a series I love, Jane Carver of Waar.  An expy of John Carter of Mars shows up in the second book as the villain, and poorly handled it could have felt like a snide “fuck you to all my predecessors in this genre.”  As written, though, it was “isn’t it fucked up that John Carter of Mars owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy?”  This works because it is a valid point.  It is fucked up that John Carter of Mars owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy.

League, on the other hand, is like going “It’s it fucked up that John Carter of Mars ate children?”  It’s not a valid point, and it just makes me go “But…he didn’t?”

Holy hell. I loved Beyond the Black Rainbow, and I’ve been waiting for years for Panos Cosmatos to be able to make another movie. And now he’s got one! With cults! And monsters! And Nicolas Cage!

PUT IT DIRECTLY IN MY VEINS.

Seriously though, this feels like the first time I heard metal that I really, really liked.

This has clarified some things I’ve noticed about earlier generations of geek culture but was never able to articulate. I’m an elder Millennial, so while I ended up coming of age in the more modern online fandoms of the 2000s, I was exposed to just enough of older fandom culture that the whole edifice feels like a lost civilization to me, glimpsed through the stacks of used bookstores, on archived webpages, even in the atmosphere of the only Worldcon I ever attended. What I wonder about, though, is what exactly happened to what you called “bouba” geekdom. Fantasy-oriented, intuitive, pagan (or perhaps Christian with a pagan gloss), the side of fandom you describe as “WASP femininity...by way of Tolkien and Disney”. I can connect the dots and chart out how “kiki” geekdom evolved into a bunch of new forms across the 2000s and 2010s, but it feels like “bouba” geekdom suffered an extinction event during that time and modern corporate pop-feminist fandom moved into its vacant niche. A while back @prokopetz discussed the subgenre of “romantic fantasy” and how it disappeared early in the new millennium, and from his description it sounds like romantic fantasy was a very “bouba” type of literature. Given the timing, I wonder if there’s some sort of connection here.

The two 90s Geek Genders were Pagan Fantasy Medieval and Atheist Techie Futurist

Ok so… hear me out. 

There was this weird thing - I won’t say it’s as clear as outright male vs female as much as kiki vs bouba. Kiki in this scenario is roughly masculinized (sharp edged and all) and bouba is roughly feminized (soft edged) but in practice it just wasn’t as clear as that.

I experienced geek culture as being *very* gendered, and what’s more is that there was a hidden set of class and culture assumptions undergirding which of those two groups you’d end up in. 

Pagan fantasy fan and techie atheist were the two ends of the spectrum in the 90s and it’s weird to realize that a lot of my trying to be pagan when I was in my teens/20s was because of this weird gendered shit and most of it was around this platonic female ideal of female geek. I was trying to perform a higher status female role in my own community; all the popular girls were slender white girls named Willow or Heather or Rowan, who were into musical theater and had long, wavy Disney Princess hair and soft hands with long tapered fingers. (Yes, this archetype is THAT SPECIFIC.)  They needed to communicate in ways that indicated that all of their answers came from pure intuition and dreams, extra points if they perform divination of some kind. They couldn’t ever be definitive or “left brained” in their personalities. It was very WASP Femininity only… geeky flavored. WASP by way of Tolkien and Disney instead of WASP by way of idealized domestic figures.  Most importantly, they were NOT Jewish. They did not have “Jewish hair.” They did not come up in Jewish households where argument is a love language. They were not loud and did not talk with their hands. They had beliefs about religion and mysticism couched hugely in Christian-style faith even if it was cloaked in pagan aesthetics, and this was upheld as an ideal to perform.  (And what’s more is that in “bouba” flavored geek culture, I have actually encountered a lot of casual anti-Semitism, in addition to the aforementioned social pressure to conform to a gentile female ideal. I’ve VERY SELDOM encountered ANYWHERE near the degree of casual anti-Semitism in “kiki” flavored geek culture.)  When I’m in spaces where “bouba” is the female ideal, it often feels like I went from there being one normie cis female ideal I couldn’t perform, to finding the same female ideal upheld in a lot of geek spaces and having it be even *harder* to perform. Which is a big reason why I hung out in corners of geek culture that more often were atheist computer types who liked hard sci fi. (The “kiki” nerds.) 

But another thing is that *class* is why I was never able to find a place in “bouba” geek culture.

“Bouba” geek culture participation - actual subculture membership beyond being a casual - actually requires participation in hobbies and habits that can become as expensive as, say, being into ski trips and vacations, and one’s status in that setting depends upon how much they’re able to buy in. “Bouba” geek culture is HEAVILY gentrified, and always has been.

“Cyberpunk/computer kid/harder sci fi fan” culture wasn’t as hard to access. If anything, being in those spaces *made* me money instead of *costing* me money.

I *wanted* to be part of many “bouba” geeky things but… I *couldn’t.* Even when I started making enough money to do it, suddenly, I just *didn’t have enough time.* You have to have whole weekends to spare. Once I started making the money, I was spending my free time going to tech conferences, trade shows, etc. The resentment just grew and grew.

I feel like some geek spaces have always been heavily gentrified in ways outsiders don’t parse in the way that people just Don’t See Class. It’s for that reason that I actually don’t support that being the dominant face-forward of geek culture the way it has become. 

“We aren’t classist. But you must afford xyz activities and have the free time to do them, to be one of us. Because of your gender.”

It was actually much easier to move in kiki space than bouba space.

You’re not an awful person, Madiha. You’re passionate about what you believe in and you stick to your principles, but you’re always willing to be open-minded, which is so hard to do in this day and age. That doesn’t sound like a bad person to me. I am probably the last person who should be an amateur counselor, but remember: those negative thoughts you have are not. true. They are years of insecurity and fear twisted by depression into a cudgel that give you a false view of reality and convince you that you deserve to be unhappy. Nothing they say is true.

We do not think that way about you.

You deserve to be happy. You will be happy. Whenever those thoughts start to roll in, remember that they are do not reflect reality and they are lying to you. Hold on to that. (This is really weird for me to write, but it tears me up to see you burdened with so much and know there’s almost nothing I can do about it.)

im really afraid im just a like, completely awful person but just utterly deluded in my own goodness that i dont see why everyone hates me

I may not understand any of what’s going on in the show, and I may still believe that Algernon is a kind of furniture polish, but hearing you guys talk about Betterman always brightens my day.

I feel not good but I did manage to record Anime Club with @plumerium 

Now that’s interesting: Su rebuilt the domes of Zaofu. I always thought Kuvira’s order to dismantle the domes was a very important symbolic act. While her order was a practical directive to acquire enough refined platinum to build her mech, it also illustrated a fundamental difference between Suyin and Kuvira. Su’s concern was always to maintain Zaofu as a personal fiefdom separate from the Earth Kingdom. The city was built in a valley and each district had its own dome to isolate it from both the outside world and its neighbors. By contrast, Kuvira saw Zaofu as a model for how the EK could become a modern multinational "nation” that Su kept for herself. By dismantling the domes, Kuvira not only asserted her ownership of Zaofu, she also broke down the barriers that Su had erected to isolate Zaofu from the EK. To spread the gospel of Zaofu to the rest of the EK, Zaofu needed to come out of its shell and join the EK as a city like Omashu or Ba Sing Se. Seeing the domes rebuilt makes me feel that Su ultimately didn’t learn anything from her experiences in Book 4, and her main concern after returning home was to put everything back to the way it was and pretend the last four years never happened...which is a very Su thing to do. Unless, of course, this is a flash back, in which case disregard all that I have written. (Gonna tag @coppermarigolds and @the-moon-avatar in this post for funsies.)

The metalbending city of Zaofu, from The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire Part Two.

This is why Bryke didn’t want to introduce guns in The Legend of Korra.

The perfect match. @lazarus-cell

Ha ha ha, this thing. I actually read The Angel of the Revolution about a decade ago when I was in my steampunk phase. What I mostly remember about Angel is its gleeful Russophobia. The Terrorists see the autocracy and cruelty of the Russian Empire as the greatest threat to the free peoples of the world, and when Tsar Alexander III (remember, written in 1893) acquires a fleet of airships in his quest to dominate Europe, he becomes the ultimate enemy the Terrorists have to defeat. There’s a lot in this book that’s objectionable to modern eyes, but the one that sticks with me is a bit near the middle where the Terrorists are flying over St. Petersburg and just decide to blast Kronstadt off the face of the Earth on a whim. My memory is hazy, but I think there’s also an extended sequence in a hidden mountain plateau in Ethiopia where the Terrorists have their main base, and we sort veer into some late 19th century-vintage mysticism. There’s also a sequel, Olga Romanoff from 1894, which can also be read at Project Gutenberg over here. This one picks up in the year 2030, in a world that has been peacefully unified for generations under the patient stewardship of the Terrorists, who now call themselves “Aerians”, and their airships. However, the pax aeronautica is broken by the titular Olga Romanoff, descendant of the defeated Alexander III and a diabolical mesmerist, who aims to avenge Tsarist Russia’s defeat by allying with the forces of Islam and challenging the Aerians for control of the planet. Then in the end the Earth passes through a comet’s tail and everyone is killed by poison gas, but a few Aerians survive in underground shelters to reemerge and repopulate the world. So, yeah. To put it as nicely as possible, The Angel of the Revolution and Olga Romanoff are products of the culture and era that made them, and they do not transcend that culture and era. They’re not the sort of thing you’d read if you don’t have a scholarly interest in that particular form of British sf known as “scientific romances”. Perhaps the most interesting thing about them to a modern reader is that they put some of H.G. Wells’s own stories into context. Wells’s own The War in the Air (1908) in particular feels very much like a response to Griffith’s novels. (And wouldn’t you know it, The War in the Air is also available on Project Gutenberg right here!). While Wells’s novel has its own prejudices and blind spots as well, it undercuts the power fantasy of Griffith’s novels by showing both the horror of saturation bombing along with its inability to be decisive on its own, and the war just drags on until all industrial civilization is destroyed and humanity is driven back to subsistence farming.

I started reading a book called “The Angel of the Revolution” (free on Project Gutenberg), and it is so bad in the most fascinating way

It was written in 1893 by this guy named George Griffith, who was a lot like H. G. Wells, writing near-future science fiction that combined technological speculation, adventure, and a socialist message.  But Griffith is, more, uh … look, just let me summarize.

We’re ten years in the future – it’s 1903.  The central character is a nerdy 26-year-old dreamer who’s devoted his entire life to building a heavier-than-air flying machine.  His prospects are drying up, everyone’s making fun of him, but at last he succeeds in building a little scale-model airship that flies (he’s discovered a chemical reaction allowing for very light fuel).

By chance, he runs into an agent of a massively powerful worldwide conspiracy called “the Terrorists.”  They seem to be left-wing anarchists of some sort, and are said to have been behind the real-life Russian nihilist movement.  But their ideology itself is rarely talked about and only then in platitudes, while on nearly every page there is a loving authorial focus on their methods.

Their main form of activity seems to be arranging the killing of people they don’t like.  They have agents high up in all majors institutions, allowing them to routinely kill public figures and successfully cover up their deaths.  (They love pointing out that these are not “murders” so much as “executions,” because they are bringing bad people to justice.)  They have a centralized power structure organized in circles around a single leader.  Their members obey orders from their superiors without question, up to and including sacrificing their lives.  Snitches and other betrayers are promptly and efficiently killed:

“Every one of the cabs is fitted with a telephonic arrangement communicating with the roof. The driver has only to button the wire of the transmitter up inside his coat so that the transmitter itself lies near to his ear, and he can hear even a whisper inside the cab. […]”

“It’s a splendid system, I should think, for discovering the movements of your enemies,” said Arnold, not without an uncomfortable reflection on the fact that he was himself now completely in the power of this terrible organisation, which had keen eyes and ready hands in every capital of the civilised world. “But how do you guard against treachery? It is well known that all the Governments of Europe are spending money like water to unearth this mystery of the Terror. Surely all your men cannot be incorruptible.”

“Practically they are so. The very mystery which enshrouds all our actions makes them so. We have had a few traitors, of course; but as none of them has ever survived his treachery by twenty-four hours, a bribe has lost its attraction for the rest.”

In fact, they sound exactly like a one world government, and despite being a bunch of anarchists who want all governments to be destroyed, they revel in the control they’ve achieved.  Yet their chosen method of destroying all governments is this targeted murder campaign which is carefully made to look like the work of many diffuse and weak activist groups.  Rather than, you know, saying “hey we actually control you all, the jig’s up now,” or just undermining the works from the inside.

The important Terrorists all seem to be super-rich and lead opulent lifestyles.  Partially this is because they need to pretend to be normal powerful people, and super-rich leaders are used as an explanation for how the Terrorists got so much power, but it’s still treated in the narration as awesome sexy coolness rather than a necessary evil.

Everyone talks in bombastic, Romantic speeches, and the Terrorists – who supposedly hide themselves from the world with unbroken success – are constantly tripping over themselves to reveal their true identities and explain key facets of their grand plans.  This is to a kid they’ve only just met, whom they have no reason to trust, and whom they only care about because he’s built a tiny flying machine that they believe will scale up to military use (because he says so).

There is a lot of talk about “the coming war.”  Everyone has the (correct) sense that the Great Powers are gonna have a big dust-up one of these days.  Since a bloody conflagration is going to happen one way or the other, might as well have it in the Good way, the one that fully destroys “Society,” so it can be followed by, um, something:

After that, if the course to be determined on by the Terrorist Council failed to arrive at the results which it was designed to reach, the armies of Europe would fight their way through the greatest war that the world had ever seen, the Fates would once more decide in favour of the strongest battalions, the fittest would triumph, and a new era of military despotism would begin – perhaps neither much better nor much worse than the one it would succeed.

If, on the other hand, the plans of the Terrorists were successfully worked out to their logical conclusion, it would not be war only, but utter destruction that Society would have to face. And then with dissolution would come anarchy. The thrones of the world would be overthrown, the fabric of Society would be dissolved, commerce would come to an end, the structure that it had taken twenty centuries of the discipline of war and the patient toil of peace to build up, would crumble into ruins in a few short months, and then – well, after that no man could tell what would befall the remains of the human race that had survived the deluge. The means of destruction were at hand, and they would be used without mercy, but for the rest no man could speak.

Our protagonist worries for a sec about brutal extrajudicial murder, but handily remembers that violent people aren’t actually human, so it’s OK to kill them:

Colston spoke in a cold, passionless, merciless tone, just as a lawyer might speak of a criminal condemned to die by the ordinary process of the law, and as Arnold heard him he shuddered. But at the same time the picture in the Council-chamber came up before his mental vision, and he was forced to confess that men who could so far forget their manhood as to lash a helpless woman up to a triangle and flog her till her flesh was cut to ribbons, were no longer men but wild beasts, whose very existence was a crime.

In what I’ve read so far, not much has been said about the leader, except that his name is Natas, which you’ll note is “Satan” backwards.  Internet summaries tell me he has a mysterious power to control people’s minds, as if this all weren’t Code Geass enough already

There’s been more focus on his daughter, Natasha, the titular “Angel of the Revolution,” who is beautiful and enchanting and yeah I’m sure you can fill this part in even if I stop typing

Apparently the rest of the book is about the Terrorists building flying war machines and fighting a big war against everyone, which they eventually win, which somehow means that War Has Ended Forever