Notes to Hooligan (includes spoilers)

[mad_bertha]

I wrote some notes while doing the final draft of Hooligan, and then didn't release them because, hey, first over 1k fic, didn't want to sound overly-important. Now, though, I think it's nice to put the research and thinking somewhere, maybe someone might be interested in it. I posted this April 4, but deliberately backdated it to avoid spamming my flist.
There’s actually a well-known brand of lock manufacturer that have the security vulnerability, known since 1974 but only addressed by the company in recent years.

• While the Minutemen acquitted themselves, although Mothman had a hairy time of it, I felt that the Cold War environment would mean that simply facing the HUAC (House of Un-American Activities Committee) would cast a cloud over them amongst some people, especially in contrast to their previous status as heroes (the higher the climb, the further the fall). Also I only realised some time after writing and posting the fic that sandoz_iscariot 's A Few Good Men influenced the snippet about Walter reading Minutemen comics, even the part about liking them because they were real.

• radishface , my beta, rightly, raised this issue, and it is a tough one which I’m not sure if I have addressed: I made Walter relatively passive (in comparison with Sam) in the early draft of this. I agree in that original draft he came off much too detached and muted, so I’ve tried to provide more of a sense of what was going on in his head. However, I still refrained from having Walter losing it often. I figured that the processes set in motion, the encounters with social welfare and law enforcement authorities, all would have had an impact upon him. Also, he’d want to avoid going back to Sylvia, not understanding the likelihood would be slim, or, at least, being moved to another place, and would lay low and avoid getting into trouble with the authorities. Also, he did a good job killing off potential bullying. They wrote a good report of his time at the home, so, he was keeping himself out of trouble or managing to avoid the Home authorities finding out. Finally, as unreliable a narrator as Rorschach may be, I felt that his claim that he was happy at the home rung true to me--there's still room for a writer to play with this, but I felt I was stretching canon enough by having Walter's emotions run through a wringer by taking part and then rejecting the gang. All that being said, I'm personally open, as a reader, to the idea of a firey Walter that regularly got into fights because the other kids kept teasing him. Relatedly, I think I was trying to capture the Walter that was bereft of both his mother and father, and had spent most of his childhood ostracised because of his mother’s reputation. I figured that he would have been vulnerable at this point, if he was offered the chance to be part of a group and have some standing in it, and also to an older brother figure. Grown up Walter wasn’t as consistent as it seemed in his views, if anything he was more rigid, so I imagined a Walter that was less clear on this score--and had to learn a hard lesson about peer influence that froze him into the misanthrope we know and love  :)

• Sam is the young Comedian, well, not exactly, but I’ve always liked the way Walter and Eddie’s personalities work against each other, so, when I was thinking of a childhood mentor for Walter, one that was severely flawed, and yet had things to impart, intentionally and unintentionally, to Walter, I thought of Eddie. I suspected that, had Walter really known Eddie like he knew Sam, cutting through his blinkers, he might have been more horrified by Eddie. The role played by Sam could have been split up into a few key characters, comparatively less developed. Instead, I invested a fair bit of character development in this OC, and, after finishing the fic, went through a period of worrying about him dominating, but then realised that, without the strength of characterisation of Sam, Walter’s hero worship of him would become more implausible and difficult to sustain. This was a hard balance, as I was also, as I said above, trying to portray a Walter chastened by the incident with the two boys, so he’s comparatively muted in the beginning. I hope that my later chapters restore the balance, showing Walter’s development away from simply being a follower. In a way, Sam's character is what Walter is not (or will not be), and that was how I was planning to develop the latter's character--what were the weaker aspects of Sam that Walter rejects, in the end?

• Walter's sexual agency is very muted at this point--not only is he still quite young, but he's understandably confused, what with Sylvia, the accumulated effect of teasing on his psyche and approach to sexuality in general. He may have urges, but he doesn't understand them.

• This is probably obvious, but the ending is Rorschach's solution. Not ideal, not to be celebrated, but I wanted to highlight how the Walter of 1954 that Sam left behind was not the same one in 1975--how that Walter may have learned to be self-sufficient and suspicious of groups and peer pressure, but still had to go through the lessons of Genovese, Roche, his friendship and estrangement from Dan, and the Keene Act, to become Rorschach. And how these 'lessons,' even the ones in Hooligan, can't be seen as unambiguously positive ones. I don't think Rorschach fans (I count as one) are blind to this less than savory aspect of the character, but, yeah, it can sometimes be lost, particularly in the film's celebration of his violent solutions.

• There’s actually a well-known brand of lock manufacturer that have the security vulnerability, known since 1974 but only addressed by the company in recent years.

• It was uncertain whether Tijuana bibles were produced and controlled by ‘mom and pop outfits or organised crime' (a form of pornography), according to Art Spiegelman (at Salon.com). I chose the latter for this story.

• Creeping and crawling about in a house when occupants are present and oblivious--inspired, if something so creepy can be referred to like this, by the Manson family doing this for larks and also for practice. I think they also used to shift things about. My skin crawled when I read about it, because you know what they did later on.

Comments are, as usual, welcome.