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Comic Books
Films — Live-Action
(...)Even if it's debatable to call Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, or Justice League reactionary, they were undeniably reactive, as in much too much of their creative identity felt like a reaction to what was happening in other superhero movies and other parts of the genre, rather than coherent, organic development. The main thing working against the DCEU from the start has been focusing about being "not Marvel", instead of anything in its own right, reacting to or against the currently popular version of the genre instead of charting a genuinely unique path on its own.
So as the MCU increasingly found its direction in upbeat poptimism, DC went for dour nihilism. Marvel kept it colorful and maybe a little too safe, DC turned off the lights and drove off the rails. And if reflex contrarianism is that operating policy and Marvel skews broad towards a family audience with a nominally progressive mind ideological arc, mostly on track with parent company Disney's performative corporate liberalism... I mean, it's kinda inevitable that DC ends up with a superhero universe with chronic Reddit brain: mean-spirited, reactionary, backward-looking, petty, and bitter.
All culminating in The Flash, a superhero movie about boundless storytelling possibilities available within the medium, that uses them as a vehicle specifically for telling young people that they're stupid, annoying, and dangerous for even thinking about changing the world, the future, or even making their own lives better. So was it really a surprise, honestly, that not only the young people, the main audience for a movie like this, bounced off a story like that so hard?
Is it a surprise that everybody seemed to? With the world in the state that it's in, who wants to be told that hope is bad, that you shouldn't try to fix things? And that's probably not even a message The Flash wanted to send (...) but that's what can happen when you're reacting instead of creating to tell a story. You end up with a reactionary movie. One that tells the audience that a cruel, regressive narrative is supposed to be heroic and then wonders why they reject it. And when I look at the totality of it, against the whole breadth of movie culture that it exists in, in the same way Across the Spider-Verse felt like the movie of the moment, I can't imagine a film less of the moment, a film that failed to read the room more profoundly, than The Flash. A film about going nowhere fast, that would rather go backwards and be bitter about it.
So as the MCU increasingly found its direction in upbeat poptimism, DC went for dour nihilism. Marvel kept it colorful and maybe a little too safe, DC turned off the lights and drove off the rails. And if reflex contrarianism is that operating policy and Marvel skews broad towards a family audience with a nominally progressive mind ideological arc, mostly on track with parent company Disney's performative corporate liberalism... I mean, it's kinda inevitable that DC ends up with a superhero universe with chronic Reddit brain: mean-spirited, reactionary, backward-looking, petty, and bitter.
All culminating in The Flash, a superhero movie about boundless storytelling possibilities available within the medium, that uses them as a vehicle specifically for telling young people that they're stupid, annoying, and dangerous for even thinking about changing the world, the future, or even making their own lives better. So was it really a surprise, honestly, that not only the young people, the main audience for a movie like this, bounced off a story like that so hard?
Is it a surprise that everybody seemed to? With the world in the state that it's in, who wants to be told that hope is bad, that you shouldn't try to fix things? And that's probably not even a message The Flash wanted to send (...) but that's what can happen when you're reacting instead of creating to tell a story. You end up with a reactionary movie. One that tells the audience that a cruel, regressive narrative is supposed to be heroic and then wonders why they reject it. And when I look at the totality of it, against the whole breadth of movie culture that it exists in, in the same way Across the Spider-Verse felt like the movie of the moment, I can't imagine a film less of the moment, a film that failed to read the room more profoundly, than The Flash. A film about going nowhere fast, that would rather go backwards and be bitter about it.
Literature
[Homer] lived for a century in the City of the Immortals, and when it was destroyed it was he who counseled that this other one be built. We should not be surprised by that — it is rumored that after singing of the war of Ilion, he sang of the war between the frogs and rats. He was like a god who created first the Cosmos, and then Chaos.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortal
Figuring out how you'd fix a book that you don't like is one of the best creative writing exercises you can possibly do. And sometimes it can actually lead to great book ideas, you'd be amazed how many story ideas come from "Oh, I really didn't like this thing about that, I'm gonna riff on the one thing I did like and come up with my own ideas" or even just thinking "How do I take this book that has a really, really great premise and do it differently from how this author did it to "fix it"".
— Alexa Donne, "Read Like a Writer"
Live-Action TV
"They're sort of, I suppose, weirdly opposite, in that the Doctor always strikes me as sort of like an angel who aspires to be human, whereas Sherlock Holmes is a human being who aspires to be God. They're sort of opposite parts. ... [The Doctor] wants to have fun, he wants to be silly, he's very, very emotional and sentimental, whereas Sherlock Holmes is trying to put all of that behind him."
Music
Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain were once alike in many ways: two messed-up small-town guys whose lives were changed forever by aggressive, rebellious rock music. But though Nirvana and Guns N' Roses both found fame by blurring the lines between punk and metal, Rose and Cobain found themselves on the opposite side of the rock culture wars of the alternative era.
— Keith Harris and Kory Grow, Rolling Stone — "Guns N’ Roses vs. Nirvana: A Beef History"
Video Games
Horizon Zero Dawn and Days Gone are two PlayStation 4-exclusive open-world games that share the same essential structure and gameplay interests but diverge in completely opposite directions when it comes to presentation and pacing. To play them back-to-back feels like one game flowing into another as far as hands on the controller and eyes scanning the map are concerned. Stylistically though, it's an experience of an absolute whiplash. Horizon: Zero Dawn is an ambitiously gigantic map set in a verdantly post-apocalyptic version of America's Four Corners region, fixated on boss-like fights with gigantic foes singly or in small groups. Days Gone is an elaborate, small-scale map, a county and a half or so of backcountry America just a little south of where the game was developed in Bend, Oregon which, conversely, focuses on huge waves of smaller, simpler enemies. One tells a T for Teen story of classic adventure with a feminine edge, the other tells a more meandering tale that makes dudebro blood and violence a core part of its storytelling identity. I want to talk about these games together because I'm fascinated by the ways that these two studios working along such similar lines, both brand-new studio-owned IPs, both third-person open-world action titles, both leaning heavily on cinematic story presentation, both fixated on a particular style of monster for its gameplay, could end up being so artistically divergent in the actual experience of them.''
The most important shift here is not in tone, though, it's in frame. The symbols and references aren't from an older man trying to endear himself to a child, pulling details from their limited frame of reference, this story is completely introverted. Alice has lost everything that ever mattered to her and she thinks it's her fault when it isn't. Working those feelings through in the context of a literal struggle is the arc of the game's story. While that seems straightforward enough in today's market, keep in mind that this was 2000, when evil corporations with cyborgs were the primary villain of a given action game. More than that, action games typically followed a Macho Man aesthetic, from the low-key Doomguy whose bruised grin is forever etched into a generation's collective memory, to Duke Nukem's instantly recognizable voice and style of one-liners, to the great mass of grim soldiers who to this day grace the box art of the games with the same pattern of stubble, attitude, and automatic rifles. There's plenty of great exceptions to this, like No One Lives Forever's Cate Archer, but the trend unequivocally did not point in the direction of pairing Doom-style supernatural grit with a teenage girl's journey to the center of her psyche.
What makes American McGee's Alice stand out so much from even other women-lead action games like Tomb Raider I was this internal frame. Tomb Raider is not exactly about Lara Croft, it's about pushing bricks and navigating mazes. It's about exoticism and using Lara's femininity to "enhance" that exoticism for a mostly male audience. With Alice, there isn't really anything remotely sexualized about it, and the extremes being explored are extremes of image and emotion, anguish and grief, manifesting as contorted, horrifying versions of once-familiar things. On the surface, some of the symbolism is so on-the,nose and simple, and some of the images so self-indulgently gross and excessive, that you might think that the game is being edgy for the sake of being edgy, but I don't feel like that's the case here. The way American McGee subverts the iconography of Alice in Wonderland also subverts the predatory aspect of the original work. This is not a story being told by a grown man to a child, it's a story about a wounded woman, whose narrative is in her own control.
What makes American McGee's Alice stand out so much from even other women-lead action games like Tomb Raider I was this internal frame. Tomb Raider is not exactly about Lara Croft, it's about pushing bricks and navigating mazes. It's about exoticism and using Lara's femininity to "enhance" that exoticism for a mostly male audience. With Alice, there isn't really anything remotely sexualized about it, and the extremes being explored are extremes of image and emotion, anguish and grief, manifesting as contorted, horrifying versions of once-familiar things. On the surface, some of the symbolism is so on-the,nose and simple, and some of the images so self-indulgently gross and excessive, that you might think that the game is being edgy for the sake of being edgy, but I don't feel like that's the case here. The way American McGee subverts the iconography of Alice in Wonderland also subverts the predatory aspect of the original work. This is not a story being told by a grown man to a child, it's a story about a wounded woman, whose narrative is in her own control.
Western Animation
Yep, Megamind released just four months after another movie about a bald supervillain who plans dastardly schemes, with his servant or servants that answers to the name "minion", and who ultimately become reformed through the female influence in their life, saving the day from a more threatening, but also nerdier, villain in an orange spandex. Now, I know what you're thinking, "aw jeez, did Katzenberg have his tiny spy camera placed on anyone who even thought about releasing an animated movie?", but the truth be told, these movies are very different tonally and plot-wise. (...) And yeah, the precursor to Illumination's domination and DreamWorks' increasing irrelevance can be traced back to these two releases and the aftermath that followed. One was massively successful, spawning a gigantic franchise that is solely responsible for the Minion-ridded hellscape that we're now toiling in, and the other... didn't do that.
— Schaffrillas Productions, "Why Megamind is a Subversive Masterpiece"
Other/Multiple
Both H. P. Lovecraft and Jack Kirby told stories about the universe being beyond human comprehension, it's just that Lovecraft found that terrifying while Kirby found it rad. All I really have to say in elaboration on this is that one of these guys never left his house unless it was utterly necessary and the other fought in street gangs as a kid and served in WWII and maybe that says a lot about the difference in worldview.
— Ben Rowe
Took me a second for this to hit me like a bag of wet sand behind my left ear; There's a huuuge similarity between The Boys and My Hero Academia: In both settings, every superhero is a corporate mascot, hawking fast food and snacks. And The Boys is one long reference to real life historical events showing how badly corporations can screw up. Dilbert meets Watchmen.
— Kalaong
To see what the game could have been, had it actually been a genuinely sexist trainwreck, look no further than Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, itself a blood-and-gore action take on the Alice in Wonderland story, also released in 2011. That they were in development at the same time is kind of astounding, it's an Armageddon (1998)-Deep Impact situation, it seems like one ought to be trying to copy the other, but no, they're completely independent if parallel works. Sucker Punch, however, is a singularly bad movie and Madness Returns is an enduringly enjoyable game. They use so many of the same motives and even some of the same specific imagery to such very different outcomes.
(...) We're left in this strange space where the most interesting thing about The Flash isn't even the bizarre multiverse-allegorical metastory at its center, but rather that it's one of two big franchise superhero movies telling an allegorical multiverse metastory currently in theaters (...) the other one being Marvel and Sony's Across the Spider-Verse. And what's the most interesting about that isn't the fact of genre movies doubling up their similarities, but their specific differences. Whereas the animated Spider-Man feature uses its setup to strike up the radical, definitely forward-looking tone and keeping up with its young audience, rule-breaking aesthetic and the inclusive "anyone can wear the mask" tone of the original, The Flash literally and figuratively marches the DCEU to the graveyard by means of the grim, sour, defeatist lecture about how change is bad, trying to make the world better will probably make it worse and young people should shut up and listen to adults who know better. Especially about stuff like how suffering and trauma build character, teach good lessons, and if you don't have them, you won't be good at stuff. It's a regressive, reactionary "better things are not possible and you're being loud and annoying for trying" movie, that, incredibly, feels like it might have been even more mean-spirited before it was an afterthought, but I'm not sure it got there on purpose.
(...)Both of these competing concepts are driving to the same endpoint with the same overall message to the audience. That the impulsive young hero with a bold idea to not simply thwart crime in progress or repair disasters after the fact, but actually change things at the source, should actually just shut up and stay put like that stern billionaire father figure told him to, because trying to change the world will make things worse. Literally the exact opposite of where Across the Spider-Verse lands on a not dissimiliar moral question. That film says there always has to be another way, and never giving up to trying to force the system, the world, the timeline, the whole universe to be the better version of itself you know it can be is what makes a superhero super. This one says those are crazy, stupid kid impulses that need to be reigned in before you break something important. I mean, is it any wonder which one resonated with a rising audience of today and which one has been completely rejected by that same audience?
