Shogun of Steel (2002) Part 1/2

[mithen]

Shogun of Steel is an Elseworld story which places the JLA into feudal Japan.  In this world, Clark is named Hoshi (Star), a strange man with otherworldly powers. He's recruited to battle the evil warlord Zunou ("Brain" in Japanese) by a Japanese woman named Hana (Flower), who goes by Komori (the Bat).

I warn you it ends sadly!  But it also features

Comments

[irrelevant]

I just read this not too long ago--I'm on an Elseworlds kick at the moment--and in a way it amused me, but it also royally pissed me off.

It pissed me off that the only way the minds at DC could accept the possibility of 'more' between their two biggest-selling, longest lived male characters was to make one of them female. It also annoyed me that Bruce was the one they decided to turn into a woman; if they'd made Kal-El female, made it her story instead of making Bruce Kal-El's 'Blossom', I would have been a little impressed. As it is, not so much.

And Hana... this wasn't her story. It wasn't any woman's story, nor was it truly about the race of real people it supposedly depicted--they were just the setting. The whole book is dripping with white, heterosexual masculine privilege. Which makes me want to hurt people.

Please don't take this as a criticism of you or your journal; it's totally not. I'm just going off on a comic that hit me in a couple of very personal sore spots. *hugs you*

edit to correct spelling fail. *facepalm*

[mithen]

Yeah, it would have been triple the fun if they'd taken a page from The Great Mirror of Male Love and the history of same-sex samurai romances in Japanese history and run with that! It would save it from the historical inaccuracy of a girl ninja as well--if you want to be fair to Japanese history and culture, that certainly isn't part of it. Though there are lots of contemporary female ninja stories, like Shinobu as well, though those are at least by Japanese creators.

Elseworlds in general do have a tendency to look for the "exotic" settings, don't they? Africa, Victorian England, Egypt--it's a real risk of essentializing and using cultures as wallpaper in the whole genre.