225 – Class Reunion (feat. Austin Gorton)

And having finished listening:-

-The comment about Nicieza’s attention to continuity prompted the thought that these issues show the Jekyll and Hyde sides of that feature of his writing.

– #10 is a really good example of how something whose plot really doesn’t have much more to it than “They fight!” can be made interesting, and making it all turn on Angelica’s backstory is part of how this fight is much more than just people hitting one another.

It’s another reason to regret the killing of the Hellions that it took them off the table for more encounters with the New Warriors, with whom they turn out to work extremely well. Although I can’t put my finger on exactly why — it’s more than just “They’re both made of young people.” It might be that the New Warriors are young people at different ages who are quite different from one another and are together out of their individual choies, and that constrasts really well with the regimented and uniformed private-school students who all obey their headmistress. But, anyway, they do work well together, and the creation of Beef and Bevatron suggests that Nicieza had plans for them that we never got to see.

In fact, I hate to say it, but reading #10 again put the recent turn in the X-Force issues that the podcast has been covering in perspective, and reminded me that Nicieza maybe wasn’t bringing his A-game to either of his X-books, even if X-Force became the better of the two. Nicieza is just so much better when he doesn’t have the cold dead hand of Chris Claremont gripping him and draining the life out of his writing.

– On the other hand, #31 showed the downside of close attention to continuity, because it holds within it the temptation to write entire stories that are nothing but continuity implants. Our host and his guest discussed the possible reasons for the Nova Roma retcon, and I personally assumed that it was for the reason raised in the dialogue — that, when James (IIRC) says that it’s weird that the Nova Romans haven’t “advanced,” he’s voicing Fabian Nicieza’s sense that the pulp-fiction trope of the lost civilization that remains exactly the same is too dumb for the sophisticated modern world of
1993.

Anyway, whether or not that’s actually the case, it reads as if it is. From the beginning, it’s suggested to the reader that the reason for this story is to “fix” a plausibility problem that the characters themselves should have noticed. This is not the best way to get your reader invested in your story, I think, at least not the superhero-comics reader, for whom “real-world plausibility” is not likely to be high on the list of priorities.

But the actual retcon does have its merits. Read as either a New Warriors story or an X-Force story, or for that matter a New Mutants story, there’s something rather good about the idea of Selene basically creating her own Ancient Rome theme park and forcing it to remain static because she loved living at that time so much. (Presumably because she could buy as many slaves to feed on as she liked.) It jibes with what our hosts persuaded me to like about the Externals in criticizing them — it’s another statement that old people who want to turn back the clock are the real threat.

Part of this, for me, is that unlike our hosts, I really like Selene, at least as Claremont wrote her in the ‘80s. She’s a great version of that X-thing where you take something from another genre (in this case vampire horror) and write it as a mutant, and then Claremont inserted that into a sword-and-sandals technicolor Roman epic. I am so there for that kind of genre mashup. And this elegantly turns that up a notch, by making the sword-and-sandal aspect Selene, in effect, writing, casting, and directing her own Quo Vadis or Spartacus or whatever for her to live in.

And there’s stuff that one could unpack here about how the image of Rome serves so recurrently in later European and American history as a touchstone for greatness that people want to recreate and at the same time as a touchstone for horrific cruelty. Rome functions very nicely as a symbol for the seductive glamor of the past in general (and isn’t that also one of the things that vampires represent?)

Plus, in this specific context, this puts its finger on one of the problems with Claremont’s Nova Roma, which is that it’s really quite racist. Supposedly, this society is composed of descendants of people from the ancient Mediterranean who have been living and intermarrying with indigenous South Americans in the Amazon for over two thousand years. And yet, everyone looks completely European. In fact, they don’t even look particularly Italian – they look like they’re all from Norway.

OK, that’s a Hollywood Roman epic thing – am I not just raising a different version of Nicieza’s “they haven’t technologically advanced” objection? Well, yes, to a certain extent. But there’s a bit more to it. Because saying that this culture is an blend of Inca and Roman, as Claremont repeatedly does, and then ignoring the Inca part of that entirely, as Claremont also repeatedly does, is in effect saying to the reader, “The Romans are the interesting part, right? That’s what we all want, isn’t it?” This is damn close to a specifically Fascist (capital-F, the actual Fascists of Mussolini’s Italy) conception of ancient Rome – this hostility to the notion that Romans would culturally interact with and intermarry with non-Europeans replicates what Fascists thought had actually happened, that the pure Italianness of the Romans had been corrupted due to immigration of and intermarriage with “degenerate Semitic easterners.”

There’s a great story here that would bring all that out – that would show Selene forcing Nova Roma to remain trapped in her idealized “pure” version of it, show her specifically “casting” European-looking people to play her “Romans” to suit her mental image.

But ithat would be a *Selene* story. It’s a serious problem that the most interesting character for this story isn’t actually in it. Selene is no more than a throwaway plot device. Instead of her, we have Empath. That could sort of work, if his motivation, that Nova Roma was the only place that he’d ever been happy, had been fleshed out a bit. But it’s merely gestured at. In fact, bluntly, that motivation seems much like Selene, just another plot device to plug a hole in a retcon that’s being done for its own sake.

– Also, if any story justifies us in nitpicking continuity, this one does. And this isn’t how Empath’s powers work! He affects emotion. He might be able to change your emotional attitude to the information that you know, but he can’t edit the contents of that information so as to give you a completely false set of memories about who you are. Arguably, you could solve that by saying that what he’s actually done is make people overwhelmingly terrified of letting the pretence down, so that everyone knows that this is all a facade, but no-one can admit it. (Might have good nightmare potential.) But this is clearly not what the story portrays: “Amara” has forgotten that she’s really “Alison Crestmere.” Also, that couldn’t teach everyone in Nova Roma to speak Latin fluently, as they did back in the Claremont era.

– OK, Bevatron’s accent is OTT. But he’s no more offensive (although admittedly I’m not French) than any of Claremont’s phonetic-accented characters were – it’s terrible, but it’s not terrible in some new way that deserves comment. And I think it’s mostly confined to the accent, unless there’s an “All French people can fire bolts of energy” stereotype of which I’m unaware. If he had been given “Sophisticated Sexy Intellectual” powers, now…

RANDOM / UNRELATED: Here’s a post i did on every different Blackbird the xmen have ever had
https://www.facebook.com/groups/4045322485/permalink/10156804496832486/

Hilariously Emma is the one to apologize to Angelica in generation x. It’s a nice moment of closure