"Competence porn," superhero comics and the disconnect between writers and their audiences
Leverage is a show that I still haven't managed to catch yet, even though I've heard nothing but good things about it.
Not too long ago, Leverage writer John Rogers coined a term so awesome, to describe something that's so sadly lacking in far too many stories nowadays, that even though I haven't even watched his show yet, I still feel it's important to turn his phrase into a pervasive meme.
The following are the quotes from his blog that are relevant to our interests:
LEVERAGE #204 "The Fairy Godparents Job" Post-game
The whole thing really clicked for me when I first heard "This kid has the world's greatest thieves as his Fairy Godparents" in the room. That was it for me, that moment. Everything else was filler.
Originally, the first act was comprised of multiple, foiled attempts to get the villain and the FBI out of the apartment. For budgetary and scheduling reasons those went away, and we wound up with one of the most sedate first acts we've ever had. Good Lord, how we agonized over spending so much time in the briefing scene in this ep. Ironically, this episode arrived just as we were collating feedback off the 'net and found, stunningly, you people love the briefing scenes. For we writers, it was always X pages of pipe we tried to make as entertaining as possible and move past to get into the plot. For the audience, watching competent people banter and plan was a big part of the appeal. "Competence porn" as we started calling it.
Let's think about this for a moment.
From everything I've heard of his show, John Rogers sounds like he's a very good TV writer - indeed, given my frequently voiced complaints about the current state of superhero comics, one of the things that's made me want to check out Leverage is the number of my friends and acquaintances whom I've seen say things like, "Why can't the protagonists of superhero comics be this competent anymore?" - and yet, even a very good writer like John Rogers expresses shock at the fact that audiences actually like stories about competent characters doing things competently.
Maybe it's the increasing degree of nihilism in society. Maybe it's the trend of pretension-driven attempts to "deconstruct" characters into oblivion. Maybe it's the fact that so many preexisting characters are now being written by people who resent having to attach their names to characters that they didn't create themselves, and genres that they wish they could be writing outside of, and who wind up taking their frustrations out on both those characters and their fans as a result. Maybe it's the lowered expectations of writers (and a certain subset of audience members) who develop inferiority complexes whenever they're forced to write (or read, or watch) characters whom they see as being more competent, decent or heroic than themselves.
And maybe, to be more charitable and fair, it's simply the fact that writers run the risk of taking for granted the positive points of the characters that they write about, and whom they therefore already know inside and out, which is why they might expect their audiences to be more willing to join them in exploring the uglier sides of characters whom those writers are nonetheless still expecting their audiences to see as sympathetic, or even "relatable."
With preexisting characters, I suspect this impulse to "deconstruct" becomes even more of a temptation, especially with well-known superhero characters, because the writer starts out with the assumption that the audience will continue to side with those superhero characters regardless, simply based on the goodwill built up by past stories, and subsequently, such writers will express genuine surprise when their audiences respond negatively to sufficiently downbeat, unflattering portrayals of those characters, because as far as such writers are concerned, the fans are supposed to like [fill-in-the-blank name of superhero character] and enjoy his adventures no matter what, because "that's what being a fan MEANS!"
And hey, to be fair, with regards to the latter motivation, I've been there myself, with both original and preexisting characters that I've written, because if it's a character that you're excited enough over having created, or a character that somebody else created that you're enough of a fan of, then of course you're going to be starting from the baseline expectation that those characters are awesome by definition, and that everyone else should just automatically see their awesomeness as clearly, and with as much love, as you do.
Except that even superhero fans - hell, ESPECIALLY superhero fans - still need to be given REASONS to root for those characters.
I'm struck by the fact that, for as much as Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer always emphasize in interviews that The Venture Bros. is all about "failure" (their word), almost all of the show's characters are still portrayed as being exceptional, if not in ADMIRABLE, then at least in IMPRESSIVE ways.
Brock Samson is increasingly morally conflicted and fed up with his lot in life, but he remains an unparalleled ass-kicker. The Monarch is a fucking batshit creeper with a pointless and self-destructive obsession, but he and Doctor Girlfriend are genuinely in love with each other. Hank is a dimwit and Dean is a wimp, but Hank has an endearingly never-say-die attitude and Dean actually seems to be winning over the heart of Triana Orpheus. As for Rusty, he may be a total failure in every aspect of his life now, but even he can take pride in the fact that even those who don't respect him as an adult still regard him as the greatest boy adventurer ever.
There's this mantra of conventional wisdom that dictates that characters need flaws in order for the audience to sympathize with and relate to them, but unless those flaws are, in and of themselves, exceptional and unique, then the only subset of the audience that will find such characters to be sympathetic or "relatable" will be the same types of mediocrity and status quo-loving milquetoasts whose favorite comedian is somebody like Dane Cook, the Wannabe-Clown Prince of Soul-Deadeningly Generic Anti-Lulz.
So much of this is tied up in the desire to pander to the "everyman," but I say, now and forever, FUCK THE EVERYMAN.
I have NEVER sympathized with or related to the guy (or gal, *cough* Rose Tyler *cough*) who's supposed to be the most ordinary, average, everyday person out there, and quite frankly, FUCK that dude for even INTRUDING on my superhero comics in the first place.
If a character MUST be a "failure" or a "loser," then make him a DISTINCTIVE failure or a WEIRD loser - don't give me fucking ARCHIE with an entitled, Seth Rogen-ized, all-too-COMMON privileged straight white boy attitude of BITCHEZ UR CRAY-ZEE AMIRITE FELLAS???
If I'm reading about characters whom we're still calling "SUPERHEROES," then even if they aren't necessarily HEROIC, they should still be SUPER in some significant way.
Give them extreme flaws if you must (and indeed, if you're writing actively ANTI-heroic characters like Deadpool, then yes, I'll agree that you MUST), but give them extreme TALENTS to accompany those flaws. If they're not quite to the level of professionals at what they do (which would be an appropriate characterization of who Peter Parker USED to be, when he was MUCH younger than he is now), then show their POTENTIAL (as John Rogers himself did with Jaime Reyes as the new Blue Beetle).
And above all else, I say again, FUCK the everyman, because he sucks, and always has.
In the original issues of Amazing Spider-Man, Flash Thompson was the everyman, for all the same reasons he was Peter's ENEMY, so he shouldn't be Spider-Man's TARGET AUDIENCE.
Not too long ago, Leverage writer John Rogers coined a term so awesome, to describe something that's so sadly lacking in far too many stories nowadays, that even though I haven't even watched his show yet, I still feel it's important to turn his phrase into a pervasive meme.
The following are the quotes from his blog that are relevant to our interests:
LEVERAGE #204 "The Fairy Godparents Job" Post-game
The whole thing really clicked for me when I first heard "This kid has the world's greatest thieves as his Fairy Godparents" in the room. That was it for me, that moment. Everything else was filler.
Originally, the first act was comprised of multiple, foiled attempts to get the villain and the FBI out of the apartment. For budgetary and scheduling reasons those went away, and we wound up with one of the most sedate first acts we've ever had. Good Lord, how we agonized over spending so much time in the briefing scene in this ep. Ironically, this episode arrived just as we were collating feedback off the 'net and found, stunningly, you people love the briefing scenes. For we writers, it was always X pages of pipe we tried to make as entertaining as possible and move past to get into the plot. For the audience, watching competent people banter and plan was a big part of the appeal. "Competence porn" as we started calling it.
Let's think about this for a moment.
From everything I've heard of his show, John Rogers sounds like he's a very good TV writer - indeed, given my frequently voiced complaints about the current state of superhero comics, one of the things that's made me want to check out Leverage is the number of my friends and acquaintances whom I've seen say things like, "Why can't the protagonists of superhero comics be this competent anymore?" - and yet, even a very good writer like John Rogers expresses shock at the fact that audiences actually like stories about competent characters doing things competently.
Maybe it's the increasing degree of nihilism in society. Maybe it's the trend of pretension-driven attempts to "deconstruct" characters into oblivion. Maybe it's the fact that so many preexisting characters are now being written by people who resent having to attach their names to characters that they didn't create themselves, and genres that they wish they could be writing outside of, and who wind up taking their frustrations out on both those characters and their fans as a result. Maybe it's the lowered expectations of writers (and a certain subset of audience members) who develop inferiority complexes whenever they're forced to write (or read, or watch) characters whom they see as being more competent, decent or heroic than themselves.
And maybe, to be more charitable and fair, it's simply the fact that writers run the risk of taking for granted the positive points of the characters that they write about, and whom they therefore already know inside and out, which is why they might expect their audiences to be more willing to join them in exploring the uglier sides of characters whom those writers are nonetheless still expecting their audiences to see as sympathetic, or even "relatable."
With preexisting characters, I suspect this impulse to "deconstruct" becomes even more of a temptation, especially with well-known superhero characters, because the writer starts out with the assumption that the audience will continue to side with those superhero characters regardless, simply based on the goodwill built up by past stories, and subsequently, such writers will express genuine surprise when their audiences respond negatively to sufficiently downbeat, unflattering portrayals of those characters, because as far as such writers are concerned, the fans are supposed to like [fill-in-the-blank name of superhero character] and enjoy his adventures no matter what, because "that's what being a fan MEANS!"
And hey, to be fair, with regards to the latter motivation, I've been there myself, with both original and preexisting characters that I've written, because if it's a character that you're excited enough over having created, or a character that somebody else created that you're enough of a fan of, then of course you're going to be starting from the baseline expectation that those characters are awesome by definition, and that everyone else should just automatically see their awesomeness as clearly, and with as much love, as you do.
Except that even superhero fans - hell, ESPECIALLY superhero fans - still need to be given REASONS to root for those characters.
I'm struck by the fact that, for as much as Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer always emphasize in interviews that The Venture Bros. is all about "failure" (their word), almost all of the show's characters are still portrayed as being exceptional, if not in ADMIRABLE, then at least in IMPRESSIVE ways.
Brock Samson is increasingly morally conflicted and fed up with his lot in life, but he remains an unparalleled ass-kicker. The Monarch is a fucking batshit creeper with a pointless and self-destructive obsession, but he and Doctor Girlfriend are genuinely in love with each other. Hank is a dimwit and Dean is a wimp, but Hank has an endearingly never-say-die attitude and Dean actually seems to be winning over the heart of Triana Orpheus. As for Rusty, he may be a total failure in every aspect of his life now, but even he can take pride in the fact that even those who don't respect him as an adult still regard him as the greatest boy adventurer ever.
There's this mantra of conventional wisdom that dictates that characters need flaws in order for the audience to sympathize with and relate to them, but unless those flaws are, in and of themselves, exceptional and unique, then the only subset of the audience that will find such characters to be sympathetic or "relatable" will be the same types of mediocrity and status quo-loving milquetoasts whose favorite comedian is somebody like Dane Cook, the Wannabe-Clown Prince of Soul-Deadeningly Generic Anti-Lulz.
So much of this is tied up in the desire to pander to the "everyman," but I say, now and forever, FUCK THE EVERYMAN.
I have NEVER sympathized with or related to the guy (or gal, *cough* Rose Tyler *cough*) who's supposed to be the most ordinary, average, everyday person out there, and quite frankly, FUCK that dude for even INTRUDING on my superhero comics in the first place.
If a character MUST be a "failure" or a "loser," then make him a DISTINCTIVE failure or a WEIRD loser - don't give me fucking ARCHIE with an entitled, Seth Rogen-ized, all-too-COMMON privileged straight white boy attitude of BITCHEZ UR CRAY-ZEE AMIRITE FELLAS???
If I'm reading about characters whom we're still calling "SUPERHEROES," then even if they aren't necessarily HEROIC, they should still be SUPER in some significant way.
Give them extreme flaws if you must (and indeed, if you're writing actively ANTI-heroic characters like Deadpool, then yes, I'll agree that you MUST), but give them extreme TALENTS to accompany those flaws. If they're not quite to the level of professionals at what they do (which would be an appropriate characterization of who Peter Parker USED to be, when he was MUCH younger than he is now), then show their POTENTIAL (as John Rogers himself did with Jaime Reyes as the new Blue Beetle).
And above all else, I say again, FUCK the everyman, because he sucks, and always has.
In the original issues of Amazing Spider-Man, Flash Thompson was the everyman, for all the same reasons he was Peter's ENEMY, so he shouldn't be Spider-Man's TARGET AUDIENCE.