Bastard stepchild of displacement activity
One of these days I'll write a long and boring essay on exactly why I've been writing X-men fanfic when I don't bother with the comics, I'm not interested in the movies, and Marvel mutants annoy me because they're whiny and won't stay dead.
Long story short, it'll boil down to this:
X-men is easy. X-men is cheap. X-men is like a strung-out, heroin-addicted downtown East Side junkie hooker who'll let you do anything for a fix.
It doesn't care how badly you use it or what sick kinks you have because it's already been screwed a hell of a lot worse by almost everyone who came before.
No matter how bad an idea you come up with, no matter how poorly you execute it, butchering character, history, plot, and reason in the process, someone somewhere's already written something which will make the crap you produce look like gold by comparison.
And usually, that person will have been paid for theirs.
Exploding communion wafers? Check.
Being so depressed over your father's favourite daughter being turned into a mute monster by your own brother that you merge with your twin and impersonate your older sister in order to take her place? Check.
Having your disembodied spirit spend ten years in the future with your second wife in cloned host bodies, raising your messianic half-cyborg son by your first wife, as a special honeymoon treat granted by your formerly brain-washed celestial avatar/cult-leader daughter from an alternate universe? Check.
The standards are set so incredibly low that it's practically a no risk proposition for a complete amateur with less than adequate language skills.
I can write whatever I want about the X-men without having to worry about disgracing the source material, because the source material just isn't that good to begin with. And considering some of the stuff incorporated into canon, I flat out don't care about getting parts of it wrong.
I'd be a lot more nervous about tackling anything which I actually like and respect and consider a quality work which I want to live up to.
Nevertheless, two brief attempts.
Jenny Sparks, Authority v1 #9; 50 words
It isn't justice when Jenny explodes Buckingham Palace with the Regis inside.
It isn't justice when the Doctor takes out Italy on her command.
They've destroyed the regime, but take limited satisfaction. The rape camps, the massacres, can never be set right.
It isn't justice, but it's better than nothing.
Elijah Snow, post Planetary #12; 50 words
Elijah Snow knows the face of evil.
He sees it in every encounter with the Four.
The artifacts stolen, the technology hoarded, the corpses left behind.
The details are different, but the rage is the same.
You could have made the world better. Instead, you choose to make it worse.
Since I don't have the best communications skills, I thought I'd add some words of explanation.
I've been meaning to do this sort of thing for my writing anyway, ever since I realized was going about it all wrong and that any English improvement programme should place learning things like punctuation, grammar, and structure at the beginning and not well, whenever.
In any case, my plans for that have been derailed for months now, so I'll just skip straight to the “motivation, objectives, and technique” part of the commentary.
The main thing about Warren Ellis' superhero writing is the sense of outrage. Well, there's also the sense of wonder, and maybe that of absurdity, but I'm not looking to turn this into a Monty Python skit.
So, outrage and absurdity; wonder and outrage.
In the Authority, he mostly uses the former. These are people with ridiculous levels of power living in a multiverse where terribly absurd things happen. Why shouldn't they use them to set things right?
Only, sometimes the dramatic ass-kicking, no matter how deserved and cathartic and satisfying, is no more than a band-aid slapped over a wound gone too septic to heal.
In Planetary, I get the feeling of wonder, and outrage at the perversion of that wonder.
A world with marvels in it should be significantly different, even for the ordinary man on the street.
There should be trickle down benefits for the masses from amazing discoveries, there should be treatments and cures or at least information gleaned from experiments.
These things should be shared, for the good of all, not kept and suppressed for the sole profit of the selfish few.
I tried to convey a little of those things in both demi-drabbles.
The first uses anaphora and diacope, two rhetorical devices * employing repetition for emphasis.
I wanted to put the focus on the idea that the wrongs dealt with could not be righted by the actions taken in response.
In the 3rd and 5th lines, there's also an attempt at antithesis, using parallel sentence structures to reinforce the notion that redress was limited.
In the second drabblet, the 3rd sentence employs a technique called asyndeton. It let me lengthen my list to include three items, while shortening it enough to fit a demi-drabble length.
It's also meant to convey a sense of incompleteness, that those are just the highlights of the sins committed, and an asyndetic list is supposed to have a stronger and more emphatic feel.
More antithesis for Snow's thoughts at the end. I think.
* Anaphora: the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines.
Diacope: the repetition of a word or phrase after an intervening word or phrase.
There may be another specific term for repeating a phrase at the start of lines at the beginning and end of a work, but I haven't learned its name.
Antithesis: opposition, or contrast of ideas or words in a balanced or parallel construction.
Asyndeton: lack of conjunctions between coordinate phrases, clauses, or words.
Definitions from Robert A. Harris' A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices and the University of Kentucky's A Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with Examples
Well, that was both more incoherent and fulfilling than I thought it would be. I should probably try navel-gazing more often. At the very least, it'll make me more flexible.
Long story short, it'll boil down to this:
X-men is easy. X-men is cheap. X-men is like a strung-out, heroin-addicted downtown East Side junkie hooker who'll let you do anything for a fix.
It doesn't care how badly you use it or what sick kinks you have because it's already been screwed a hell of a lot worse by almost everyone who came before.
No matter how bad an idea you come up with, no matter how poorly you execute it, butchering character, history, plot, and reason in the process, someone somewhere's already written something which will make the crap you produce look like gold by comparison.
And usually, that person will have been paid for theirs.
Exploding communion wafers? Check.
Being so depressed over your father's favourite daughter being turned into a mute monster by your own brother that you merge with your twin and impersonate your older sister in order to take her place? Check.
Having your disembodied spirit spend ten years in the future with your second wife in cloned host bodies, raising your messianic half-cyborg son by your first wife, as a special honeymoon treat granted by your formerly brain-washed celestial avatar/cult-leader daughter from an alternate universe? Check.
The standards are set so incredibly low that it's practically a no risk proposition for a complete amateur with less than adequate language skills.
I can write whatever I want about the X-men without having to worry about disgracing the source material, because the source material just isn't that good to begin with. And considering some of the stuff incorporated into canon, I flat out don't care about getting parts of it wrong.
I'd be a lot more nervous about tackling anything which I actually like and respect and consider a quality work which I want to live up to.
Nevertheless, two brief attempts.
Jenny Sparks, Authority v1 #9; 50 words
It isn't justice when Jenny explodes Buckingham Palace with the Regis inside.
It isn't justice when the Doctor takes out Italy on her command.
They've destroyed the regime, but take limited satisfaction. The rape camps, the massacres, can never be set right.
It isn't justice, but it's better than nothing.
Elijah Snow, post Planetary #12; 50 words
Elijah Snow knows the face of evil.
He sees it in every encounter with the Four.
The artifacts stolen, the technology hoarded, the corpses left behind.
The details are different, but the rage is the same.
You could have made the world better. Instead, you choose to make it worse.
Since I don't have the best communications skills, I thought I'd add some words of explanation.
I've been meaning to do this sort of thing for my writing anyway, ever since I realized was going about it all wrong and that any English improvement programme should place learning things like punctuation, grammar, and structure at the beginning and not well, whenever.
In any case, my plans for that have been derailed for months now, so I'll just skip straight to the “motivation, objectives, and technique” part of the commentary.
The main thing about Warren Ellis' superhero writing is the sense of outrage. Well, there's also the sense of wonder, and maybe that of absurdity, but I'm not looking to turn this into a Monty Python skit.
So, outrage and absurdity; wonder and outrage.
In the Authority, he mostly uses the former. These are people with ridiculous levels of power living in a multiverse where terribly absurd things happen. Why shouldn't they use them to set things right?
Only, sometimes the dramatic ass-kicking, no matter how deserved and cathartic and satisfying, is no more than a band-aid slapped over a wound gone too septic to heal.
In Planetary, I get the feeling of wonder, and outrage at the perversion of that wonder.
A world with marvels in it should be significantly different, even for the ordinary man on the street.
There should be trickle down benefits for the masses from amazing discoveries, there should be treatments and cures or at least information gleaned from experiments.
These things should be shared, for the good of all, not kept and suppressed for the sole profit of the selfish few.
I tried to convey a little of those things in both demi-drabbles.
The first uses anaphora and diacope, two rhetorical devices * employing repetition for emphasis.
I wanted to put the focus on the idea that the wrongs dealt with could not be righted by the actions taken in response.
In the 3rd and 5th lines, there's also an attempt at antithesis, using parallel sentence structures to reinforce the notion that redress was limited.
In the second drabblet, the 3rd sentence employs a technique called asyndeton. It let me lengthen my list to include three items, while shortening it enough to fit a demi-drabble length.
It's also meant to convey a sense of incompleteness, that those are just the highlights of the sins committed, and an asyndetic list is supposed to have a stronger and more emphatic feel.
More antithesis for Snow's thoughts at the end. I think.
* Anaphora: the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines.
Diacope: the repetition of a word or phrase after an intervening word or phrase.
There may be another specific term for repeating a phrase at the start of lines at the beginning and end of a work, but I haven't learned its name.
Antithesis: opposition, or contrast of ideas or words in a balanced or parallel construction.
Asyndeton: lack of conjunctions between coordinate phrases, clauses, or words.
Definitions from Robert A. Harris' A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices and the University of Kentucky's A Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with Examples
Well, that was both more incoherent and fulfilling than I thought it would be. I should probably try navel-gazing more often. At the very least, it'll make me more flexible.