Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.
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Recently, Gail Simone asked a question about how many different kinds of people have gathered some value or strength from the X-books over the years, and it’s reminding me of several things from the past few years that effectively have driven me away from a series that was so influential it’s imprinted on my DNA. One, the rise of Big Name Fans from a precise online circle effectively limited the “mutant metaphor” to an extremely narrow definition of queerness and literally nothing else; two, the celebration of stories that ran the gamut from tasteless to missing the point of the X-Men entirely; three, thanks to point two, they’ve effectively written themselves permanently into a corner and will alienate people either way.
The first point is a complicated one. While the metaphor has never been truly applicable to the real world and does have its own issues with who gets the lion’s share of visibility, it has always been a given that the X-Men stood for people who fight against societal bigotry. It could be racially based, religiously based, sexuality or gender identity based, disability based, or just being that weird kid in your class. That was the beauty of the concept, that all of these people from different walks of life who had experienced this other-ness could come together and fight for a better world. But in the last 15 or so years, the talent pool began to be drawn from either fans that had garnered online popularity or pros who had catered to those fans. And these fans decided that they were going to reinvigorate the mutant metaphor - sorry, I mean the Mutant Metaphor, since it’s capitalized now - by making it explicitly and solely about queerness.
Now, I am saying this as a queer person, even if the people who’ve worked on the X-books have made it clear that they wouldn’t count me as such. Their acronym ends at four letters, maaaaybe including the Q if they want to include people still questioning their identities but only occasionally. And even then, it’s only the first three that will have any real visibility (although bi identities will be largely informed by social media reveals or single-panel love interests). You won’t get any trans mutants, only trans coded mutants; you won’t get any nonbinary mutants, only ones who “represent” nonbinary identities by not being able to blend in appearance-wise. And of course, as whole-ass crossovers & plot points have made clear, in the creative stable’s world, the A can only ever stand for “ally”, specifically their casually bigoted straight pal with a bad moustache who plays the ukulele. There’s other stuff, too - POC characters will be there but only if they can call attention to them for one story or “fix” something done decades ago that feels iffy now (see the Psylocke stuff done recently). Religious characters will have their faiths & any cultural elements related to that faith played down, because none of them are religious, in fact many of them are anti-religious, and the only religion that they won’t paint as indistinguishable from a doomsday cult is Islam, out of strictly political reasons instead of any actual respect for Muslims & their culture.
I don’t know how much of it comes from a place of “write what you know”, with the creators leaning towards a lack of racial or religious variety. The queer exclusionism tends to be less explainable, since many of them are trans, nonbinary, bi/pan, etc. (No aces, though, unless they’re also under another more accepted-by-them category and tend towards pick-me-isms. Funny, that.) But the audience that latched onto this & furthered this wound up rallying around every bad idea so long as they could project their own issues & attitudes onto it. If you ever found value in the X-Men cuz you were the only non-white kid in your neighborhood or you weren’t “wired” the same way as everyone else or you just felt like a misfit, well, too bad, it’s not for you anymore. It’s just for this one particular slice of the online queer community, and if you don’t like that, it can only be cuz you’re a filthy Com*csgator.
The second part ties into this new audience of built-in defenders & knee-jerk dismissals. As much as the whole Krakoa thing feels like a good delineation mark between the end of my enjoyment of the X-Men & the beginning of it being for someone else, it really began before that. Matthew Rosenberg is a writer that I’ve never liked, and I’ve found his work to be nothing but a sea of cynicism & nihilism that has some stock romance thrown in to fool people into thinking he’s sensitive & insightful; that many of his fans recommend his work by comparing it to Venture Brothers (a show I’ve found has the same energy only without the romance cuz that would mean creating female characters who didn’t originate as transphobic jokes) is accurate, although for me it’d be a warning rather than a recommendation. So his run on Uncanny being based around sexualized suicide that the narrative portrays as a good & justified choice, a trans panic-coded murder scene done just to make Wolverine sad, a plot point that felt like it was endorsing antivax rhetoric, and everything being shrugged off cuz the straight power couple of Scott & Jean got to make out in the end should have been expected. What really made it awful, though, was the reaction to it. Defending the “suicide is the only right choice for this teenage girl to make” scene & its downright masturbatory framing is fine from his fans, cuz that’s how they’ve been trained, but celebrating him lying about donating “all” of his pay for that issue to over two dozen different crisis hotlines, when people in comics KNOW that Marvel doesn’t pay shit, was beyond scummy. Then came the trans panic murder scene, with it being specifically transmisogynistic, and he decided that his one trans man buddy (who himself is a real piece of work but that’s another day’s discussion) absolving him & donating his shiny nickel from THAT issue to the Trans Lifeline made it acceptable. And then people either ignoring or agreeing with the antivax plot… It was clear that it had been decided that Rosenberg was a Good Person & thus had to be defended, and anyone who objected to it, be it autistics who recognized Autism Speaks rhetoric in the plot or trans women being talked over by his buddy or suicidal people like me finding his defeatist attitude & lying about charity to be morally appalling, to be Bad People.
Then came Age of X-Man, with its weird pro-compulsive-romance-and-sexuality messaging that, had there been any aro or ace people that weren’t pick-mes on their staff, would have been pointed out as not as “inclusive” as they insisted it was… And creators who liked to vanity search themselves, then sic their loyal fans on anyone who didn’t praise them enough, the one of whom I ran into getting her start during this event in particular…
And then finally came fucking Krakoa.
I will just say this about Krakoa. The Venn diagram of people who insist that Krakoa was “a queer wish fulfillment fantasy” and of people who have gone fully down the H*sanoid slide cuz of Israel being shitty with zero self-awareness is a big dumb loud obnoxious hypocritical circle that’s easily distracted by stupid fashion shows. If the 2000s were all about trying & failing to apply X-Men stories to the Inhumans, this was applying an Inhumans story to the X-Men, and if they hadn’t cultivated that terminally Tumblr-brained audience of exclusionist queers who’d make any & every excuse for them, more people would have seen it. Even a dude I have come to think of as Leftist Chris-Chan eventually saw the parallels and walked back his initial praise for the Krakoa era. If THIS guy can figure it out, y’all have no excuses. But yeah, “if WE did the ethnostate, it’d be morally acceptable” was not a fun time and ran counter to literally everything in the history of the X-books.
So that brings us to the third point. You cannot go backwards. Even if you tried to do a retcon, which they bafflingly didn’t, you’d get pushback from the people who thought Krakoa was a step “forward” (read: something different). As it is, you have mutants as a minority again, and now they’re returning to a world that they removed themselves from out of an openly stated sense of superiority. They had medical technology, stuff like cancer cures, that they refused to share with the world and that’s now gone with their island - you think people aren’t gonna resent that? You think that the weird “make more mutants” Quiverfull religion that was created for the island isn’t gonna keep going, maybe even curdle into extremism like other Quiverfull sects? Krakoa has made the persecution of mutants almost make sense, more than any potential threat from their powers, because they went from looking down on the rest of humanity to not-so-humbly trying to rejoin it. Honestly, even if it would have pissed off a chunk of the audience, a retcon would have been better because it would have removed that whole “we know we’re your betters” stain from the characters.
The worst part is, Marvel doesn’t want to acknowledge that stain is there. There was a book I was half-interested in reading in the relaunch, but once I saw the extended pages of a character lamenting how much they miss Krakoa & how it was “paradise”, and we the readers were expected to sympathize, I was out. Honestly, the tactic that Gail Simone is using, to just… tell X-Men stories and work in both modern & historical glimpses of how mutants have been treated or existed, is the best way. I’m sure she’s been told to acknowledge beautiful, wonderful Krakoa, but it’s barely been done. And her book looks stronger for it. It’s written as though that awful era never happened, and we’re getting to learn about mutants as a subculture throughout history, providing we ignore that blip where they all basically became Silver Age Magneto. Even then, her book was derailed less than six issues in for a brand-wide crossover. Because of course.
Look, I don’t think I can understate the influence X-Men has had on me, from ethics to creative work. It’s imprinted on my DNA, and when I saw what Krakoa had made them into, it felt like that had become cancerous. Worse, people were celebrating the cancer. It was a decline that had been building the moment they decided that the line editor would limit his hiring to his online podcast friends, and that era that should have ended long before it actually did was the point of no return. Aside from the new characters added in Gail Simone’s book looking really cool & having some creative powers (especially the girl who has a psychic power bond with her arsonist horse), the new stuff doesn’t look all that appealing. Hell, in the case of this summer’s big crossover, Age of Fuck Over Mela’s Absolute Favorite X-Character Cuz We’re Too Dumb To Write Smart Characters As Anything But Innately Evil (Also We Still Refuse To Let Him & His Robot Alien BF Be Gay Together), they’re actively repellent. And that’s putting aside that, thanks to the BNFs who’ve helped shape the books in their image since the 2010s, the X-Men no longer feel like a cluster of people who’d have a place for every person who’s ever felt “off”. They’ve become another gaggle of exclusionists.
The past will always be there, but there’s no future for me with the X-universe. It’s become something else, and it feels like it’s a stranger wearing its skin. I will carry the influence of its golden days with me, but now it’s become something by and for a bunch of people who hate people like me & would gladly say as much. Hell, some of them already have. So if that’s what they want, they’re welcome to it.
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Wanna see the trickiest thing I’ve crocheted to date?
Really glad that the kit only had me make one of this motif.
Having to pass the working yarn (which you will probably need to cut) underneath the crossed-over stitches to maintain the motif was one of those techniques that you don’t get warned about doing in beginners’ books. At least my tension with treble stitch variations (US treble) is improving.
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Lightning-squared round! Cuz something something micro-blogging.
Saying someone who states Holocaust denialism, openly hates other queer people, and says everyone who died on 9/11 deserved it has “good politics” is not doing y'all any favors. In fact, it's kinda making me hope the Fox News crowd picks up her story out of spite at this point.
Speaking of, if they could talk about literally anything else instead of a faux-martyred pundit, that'd be awesome. Not cuz I care about their pet topics but cuz the constant coverage has broken Mom's brain even further. Y'all got her watching sappy memorial fancams, and it’s beyond ridiculous.
Well, I did it. I bought the subscription box kit, so that's 2 of them I'm doing now.
There's a couple people that I miss seeing from Bluesky, but having to slog through the endless sea of bullshit so I can see their cat updates or their actual creative posts just isn’t worth it. Especially after one of them jumped on the “must defend the objectively horrible person cuz she's trans & therefore beyond reproach” bandwagon.
It's extremely depressing when you finally get to go to the place that's the closest thing you have to a “happy place”, having a truly wonderful time, only for the day to end with a person who always deliberately chooses to be miserable pulling their usual bitter shit over a single parking ticket & vowing to never go there again.
On a related note, as much as I don't really want one & definitely can't afford one, I kinda need a new car.
Made the mistake of looking at Bluesky (for a DM reply), and now the same people who scream about “the world needs more empathy & kindness” are demanding that they be allowed to tell people to kill themselves if they've decided they're Bad People. Lovely. If y'all insist on judging every other platform by its extremes so can dismiss them as “the Nazi bar”, y'all have turned into “the terrorist cell” within the past two years. You’ve let the promise of Alf's hog down for the sake of hateful hypocrisy just as demographics-driven as any actual bigotry group. I guess my unwillingness to make exceptions for leftists being objectively immoral makes me an evil evil centrist now. Oh well.
Oh no, I spoke ill of the sacred texts known as Venture Brothers again! Time to wait & see how long till randos show up to harass me for not watching a show I didn’t enjoy in full at least 4x while taking notes before I criticized it and how I’m a closet Klansman for not liking that they constantly recommend their religion substitute whenever I suggest a revival of something that I actually enjoy! Seriously, though, that’s what the fans of this show do, and I have zero idea why they think it’s any different than a screaming street preacher. Also, if that show was making new episodes now, they’d be apologizing for apologizing for all of the bigoted jokes, cuz Adult Swim’s creators will say whatever they think needs to be said to appease their attack dogs… I mean, fans.
Everything that the kiddos in the IWC think CM Punk is appears to actually apply to Andrade. Who wants an over-under on where he’ll go next and how long he’ll last? I’m saying TNA, less than six months. Dude’s got skills, but none of them appear to be people skills.
It’s kinda stupid how excited I am for the MGRP Restart anime. I’ve been wanting this since I first read the books years ago, and it’s finally FINALLY happening!
You don't need to say “I'm about to be really obnoxious about boycotting (insert thing here)”. By announcing you're boycotting something, it's safe to assume that you're already obnoxious as fuck and want everyone to know it. It’s one thing to just not opt to use/buy something, but the people calling for boycotts are ALWAYS off-putting. Even when they don’t think they’re doing it, they’re just brow-beating anyone who they decide is “immoral” for not doing the boycott, and the tendency to gloat about money/job losses experienced by their targets is especially vile. At least when their ideological opposites do it, they’re aware of the cruelty/bullying in play and either just don’t care or enjoy it. They don’t try to paint being an asshole to strangers or mocking layoffs at Target as somehow moral & justified like I’ve seen.
It's so weird that the rights holders of Princess Session Orchestra aren't licensing it for any localization anywhere. I thought it was good ol shounen monofocus from this end, but Italy's biggest licensing group said that they’re turning down any requests to make it available legally outside of Japan. It’s both baffling and depressing, cuz it all just speaks about how little faith anyone has in non-ironic & non-nostalgic magical girl media.
Extremely torn about Danganronpa 2x2. On one hand, that fact it’s an alternate take on the events & not just a rehash of the original story is interesting; on the other hand, I feel like the major motivation behind this is to get more money from Komaeda fangirls. I’d rather have a new story & cast set in the same general universe (even if it’s one of the “seasons” we didn’t see in V3), but I guess that’s what fangans are for.
Sad zucchini update: the baby zuke was crushed to death by pine cones from the neighbor's trees. However, other flowers are setting up into baby zukes, so maybe one of those will make it. Also, in the same non-veggie-garden area, it appears that there's a stalk of millet growing.
Encouragement to “just make your own thing” would ring a lot less hollow if there was an audience for it.
Was gonna write a whole piece reflecting on my fondness for Jonny Quest & how it sucks to be a fan of something that’s become utterly hated over the years thanks to a combo of inability to accept historical context matters & spiteful dudebros getting their own subnetwork, but I already tempted fate with the X-Men part, so it’s not really worth it. I will say this, though: while it’s a small fandom, it’s still another one where shipping became the most important thing ever, and that is intensely depressing to me.
CM Punk had a Livejournal during his RoH days, and it's still up! I’m sure it’s too… 2000s for some people to handle.
On a related note, I miss the little mood indicators LJ had for their posts. I remember using a custom one made with Moy & Moder art from the Reboot Legion.
Given the amount of times I've seen surprise genitals on my Bluesky TL cuz the poster didn't think they needed to label a close-up of them triple-fingering themselves as “adult content”, maybe I can see why they're just going for a blanket ban. There were methods in place to avoid it, but some of y’all refused to use them, so now it's collective punishment time.
Sorry, didn't run into anything worth a video recommendation this week. But considering last week's had three videos linked, just mentally insert one of those instead.
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This week’s cat picture features elusive gray cat lip freckles!
With bonus highly boopable snoop!
See you all next weekend!
And a fantastic Earth Wind And Fire Day to us all!
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