Five Things Meme

[mithen]

I'd been kind of avoiding this meme because...well, once I get talking meta there's really, really no stopping me. I'm an academic, it goes with the territory. But I commented on anthraciteowl's wonderful analysis of why she loves Tim Drake and she gave me five things and...I could no longer resist.

If anyone hasn't done this meme, or would like to do it again, let me know and I'll give you five things I associate with you! Feel free to comment without asking for five things as well, I won't slap you with it unless you specifically ask for it, and I always love to talk meta. :)

Lots of burbling below the cut!



1. Bruce Wayne
I came to fandom for Superman and stayed for Batman. At first I paired Clark with Bruce in part as a default, as one of the few characters in the DCU strong-willed enough to keep Clark on his toes (clearly he likes his romantic partners strong-willed and unawed). But as I read more Batman comics and re-watched my beloved animated series, I grew more and more to appreciate Bruce very much on his own terms. For me, Batman is a symbol of hope in a very different way than Superman is. Superman is the dawning hope, the inspiring hope, the hope that brightens the soul. Batman, on the other hand, is the hope that keeps going even when there's no reason for it, the strength to get out of bed in the morning when there seems to be no point, the will to keep moving through the darkness when you're not certain there will ever be an end to it. He's a willed hope, a bone-deep faith that a mere human can make a difference, even when days and weeks and maybe even years go by without seeing that difference at all. In many ways, that's far more amazing to me than the sunlit hope Superman stands for. Hope when there's nothing to hope for, faith within the utter dark night of the soul.
 



2. Clark Kent
Now it's embarrassing for me to admit that for a long time I disliked Superman as well. :P In college and graduate school I was an X-Men reader. Superman was for children and for people with simplistic moral standards. In my mind, Superman was the high school quarterback, the popular kid, the golden boy who everyone looked up to, who never felt doubt or uncertainty.

That started to change when I started to get back into comics in 2002 or so. Kingdom Come--a future AU in which Clark gives in to despair and locks himself up in the Fortress, abandoning the world--rattled my assumptions. Birthright--a retelling of Superman's early years that recast him as a geek, a loner, a perpetually insecure boy who feels out of place not just in his hometown but in the world--shattered them altogether. The modern conception of Superman in which Clark is the real persona, not a fake identity Superman hides behind as in the Silver Age, rang very true with me. Under the bright spandex and heroic acts I saw a person who wasn't sure he had value, who wasn't certain he was qualified for all this power, and I fell in love with him.
 



3. Identity Porn
Which actually leads nicely to identity porn! I think it was thete1 who coined the term, and it means roughly something like "When characters play around with shifting identities." The "porn" is there because the results can be devastatingly sexy. :) When Superman is at a fundraiser and flirts with silly Brucie Wayne, and both of them know Superman is really the rather shy Clark and Brucie is really Batman, that's identity porn.

I love playing with identities because--to get horribly pedantic for a bit--it's a metaphor for the human psyche. That is, comic book superhero characters are generally not terribly complex or nuanced, but when they have so many different personae it functions at a certain level as a sort of concrete symbol of the complexity we all have. Kal-El is the alienated, lost part of us that feels inhuman sometimes, Superman the active public face we put on, Clark the insecure, warm-hearted man. Same with Batman--Batman is the will to power, to change the world; Brucie the face we put on to look inoffensive and unthreatening; Bruce the scarred and caring person who struggles to make connections. The rest of us don't dress up in armor or spandex (uh, mostly), but inside we have the same complexities. Sexy, sexy complexities.
 



4. Krypton
I love Krypton because there's no real canonical answer for what it was like there. :) There's a massive, contradictory wealth of information and the writer can pick and choose whatever they like, mixing and matching for whatever fits the story. Like a lot of things about the DCU (see #5) there are so many versions that readers are generally able to imagine Krypton as however you're describing it. Readers are unlikely to say "No, this isn't Krypton, they wear body suits on Krypton and never speak face to face"--maybe their personal image of Krypton is like that, but there are so many other versions that they all work. That last clause is a pretty good summary of why I love writing in the DCU.
 



5. AU stories
DC fandom is crazy. It's crazy because "canon" is just a tiny, tiny slice of the source material. For example, "in canon" Bruce Wayne is dead. And every week there are three or four comic books titles that come out (Batman Confidential, Gotham at Midnight, Cacophony, Batman/Superman, Trinity, and Superfriends just to name the ones I can think of off the top of my head) in which he's alive and kicking. And that's not even counting the Nolan movies, Batman: The Animated Series, The Batman, Batman: Brave and the Bold...well, you get the picture!

Even cooler, AUs are canon in DC, a phrase that would be an oxymoron anywhere else. But there are vampire AUs, Civil War AUs, pirate AUs...I read an AU recently (a canon one) where Lex Luthor was a record producer and all the heroes were musicians who worked for him. Crazy. There are few other fandoms as AU-friendly as comic books.

That said, I don't write many of what I consider "full" AUs! In my mind, there are three kinds of AUs (of course, the lines are blurry and there's lots of gray areas!):

A. Departures from specific canon stories, like rewriting "Divided We Fall" to have Clark and Bruce fall in love in the process, but keeping the basic shape of the story. These I write a fair amount of...uh, in part because it's kind of a "cheat," because one has a readymade plot to draw from.
B. "What if?" sorts of stories, where one bit of canon is changed and the author follows that diverging path into the future. These I write a fair amount of! What if Bruce were raised in Atlantis? What if Kryptonians invaded Earth? What if there was a wormhole between Krypton and Earth? I find fascinating following the world from that one pivotal change and seeing what that does to the rest of the world. Very often most of it stays the same, so I can focus the changes on a few characters. The more changes there are, the more nervous I tend to get, leading to...
C. Full-on AUs, where the characters are transposed into a wholly different world, usually with a major time shift. Bruce as a pirate in the 1500s, Clark as a samurai in ancient Japan, the JLA as nonpowered high school students are all the most dramatic kinds of AU. I actually am really uncomfortable writing these! I love reading them, but I tend to get overwhelmed when I consider doing them. They're very fun to think about, but I can get hopelessly lost in the details and end up trapped in the plot-equivalent of thick underbrush, unable to see the forest for the trees. There are so many DC characters to consider and try to fit in. Of anything I've written, "The House of the Earth" is probably the closest to this (it's more a type B, but the change is so major it basically changes the whole world). Gah, I've gotten so paralyzed at times, sitting there wondering, "What's Arthur doing in this world? Where's the Joker? Wildcat? Katana? Cass? Augh!" I really prefer stories where I can focus on two major characters and let the rest of the world slip by unaltered.

Despite this, I still am hoping to write the pro-wrestling AU someday... *nudges damos*...