231 – Life Bites

Scattered thoughts:-

– The Angry Claremontian Narrator is now the Jaded Claremontian Narrator. Plus, at the end, the X-Cutioner seemed to become the Sexy X-Cutioner. Which I suppose would be the Sex-Cutioner. Which is probably a thing that exists and no, I’m not going to put that into a search engine.

– I must admit, while the Mastermind story isn’t 100% explicit that you’re supposed to forgive him, I think it’s putting its thumb quite strongly on that side of the scales.

I mean, there’s this: “People make mistakes, Jason. Sometimes it’s a momentary lapse of judgment. Once in a while, it’s an entire lifetime spent charging off in the wrong direction. You’re one of the fortunate few who got a chance to make amends. And I was fortunate enough to have shared that experience with you.” Also: … this woman possesses attributes that are uniquely human. Such as compassion… …forgiveness… …and love. Things like Jean kissing Wyngarde on the forehead (when he’s dead, and it will do nothing to comfort him — it has to be an expression of how Jean is supposed to feel, I think). Etc.

At a minimum, Jean considers Wyngarde to have “made amends” and Jean is displaying “forgiveness.” Obviously, the reader does not have to endorse that stance, but I don’t think the story undercuts or ironizes it in any way — I think we probably should take Jean as being presented as doing the right thing. Of course, one does not have to agree with the story about that. I think the minimizing of Mastermind’s culpability is a definite flaw, in fact.

– I thought Jay was 100% right about how this annual sums up Peter David’s X-Factor. There’s all this stuff in it that’s good, but there’s also really terrible stuff.

In fact, I don’t know that our hosts were hard enough on the “Your mother was no better than she should be!” twist. Because in context, it’s presented as making it entirely reasonable that Charon’s relatives refused to take him in when he was orphaned! I mean, what?

Plus there’s the fascinating detail that Charon’s mother was a “high-priced hussy.” Presumably this is meant to explain why she and her husband could have appeared like well-dressed respectable people who could afford nice things like pearls instead of looking like the degenerates they were. When you bear in mind that this is “instead of being Thomas and Martha Wayne,” there’s a definite sense of “Fooled you! You thought they were decent WASP aristocrats who acquired their money the way the Lord intended, by inheriting it from ancestors who committed genocide in the colonial period. But no, they’re really those kinds of people.”

It’s a shame, because I would rather like a X-story built around a Batman riff. One of thing that surprises me is how rarely discussions of the origin of the superhero genre in the interwar period take into account that masked vigilantism directed at terrorizing “criminals” wasn’t a fantasy, but something that was happening in real life on a large scale, although it trailed off in the 1930s. Mostly in the South, but not by any means entirely. (For instance, as our hosts are probably aware, Portland had one of the highest per capita Klan memberships in the country.)

Now, there are a lot of different things that went into the origins of the superhero (which is probably why it’s such a fertile area for genre hybrids), and this is only one. But it is one: when you have a clone of the Shadow like Batman, who wears a mask and is explicitly about using private violence to terrorize the wrong sort of person, there is no way to say that is not (among other things) aligning itself with night-riding in some way.

So an X-book would be a great place to pull out the way in which celebrating masked vigilantism, as superhero stories tend to do, involves occluding the way in which actual masked vigilantism has historically functioned to terrorize minority populations in the US.

– I really liked the Guido back-up story, though. Especially the way in which the irony at the end strikes you: that the story is actually saying that, no, Guido has no hope that his fellow humans will ever behave any better, and the only affection he can hope for is from a dumb animal that (as the story has pointed out) cannot understand what is going on.

I wonder if Cloot is a reference to Klute, the movie Jane Fonda starred in where she played a sex worker (and won an Oscar for it)? If the (awful, not funny) punch line is that the summoner was the son of sex workers, I wouldn’t put it past David, from everything you guys have pointed out about how far he’ll go for a name gag.