Weavers #2

[laughing_tree]

Super-heroes work gorgeously and entertainingly when kept in, y'know, super-hero universes. Recognisable but distinct, like I said (and yes, “the ancient past” does count). Start trying to impose the archetype upon our own inconveniently complicated, paranoid, connected and irrational world and there are really only two outcomes: one is that you wind-up telling grimhook de-constructivist stories about how kinky, simplistic, silly, impractical, tyrannical or venal the whole notion is. The alternative is that you start teaching a generation of young comicbook readers that we really do (or, worse, should) live in a tidy world where everything can be reduced to good-versus-bad [...] With Weavers I wanted to do something that changed the emphasis away from that tiresome old tension between exaggerated fiction and grim reality (“two tropes enter, one trope leaves”). -- Si Spurrier

Comments

[caivu]

If those are the only two options you can think of, you don't have much imagination.

[laughing_tree]

What stories would you consider examples of this third path?

[caivu]

I don't know of any offhand, but to say there's only two options ("grimdark deconstruction" and "this is how the world should be") seems kinda silly. Why only those two extremes?

Why does treating superhero tropes seriously and realistically require a deconstructionist, dark take, for example? I'd think there'd be a whole spectrum of options.

[laughing_tree]

The argument would be that the concept of superheroes is inherently flawed when viewed through a real world lens, so any realistic treatment can't escape those flaws.

I'm reminded of a bit I heard about Star Wars, arguing that the franchise can never really explore the topic of droid sentience, even though that's the sort of potential-laden topic lots of interesting SF has played with -- because if you do so you run into the fact that all the heroic characters are essentially slave-owners, and who wants to see that? So the only thing the franchise can do is *not go there*.

[caivu]

But I don't think that's necessary. It just takes some thinking to make it not flawed from a realistic standpoint. I don't know exactly what that would look like, but I refuse to believe it's not doable.

For your Star Wars example, the way to "fix" that issue is to just flat say that no, droids aren't sentient (because they're machines, for example). Why isn't that an option? Incidentally, that question of AI sentience is one I wish loads of stories in general would stop faffing about with and just commit one way or the other, and proceed from there.

[laughing_tree]

"I don't know exactly what that would look like, but I refuse to believe it's not doable."

Perhaps, but the fact that nobody's done it yet, despite all the myriad iterations of superheroes the comic medium has constantly streamed for decades, leads me to believe it's going to take exceptional originality and talent to achieve.

"Why isn't that an option?"

Because as written the droids clearly have their own emotions, desires, and will.