So I did indeed watch WrestleMania, which mostly sucked. Some people are touting Undertaker/HHH and Cena/Rock as being good matches, but I thought both were lousy – the first was a couple of old limping guys trying to make Jim Ross’ dramatic announcing meaningful, and the second was just sloppy wrestling. Jericho/CM Punk was not bad, but also not a show-saving match (it had a slow start and a stupid bit about Jericho trying for the intentional DQ). Honestly, in retrospect the highlight of the show may end up being Daniel Bryan losing to Sheamus in 18 seconds, not because that was a good thing (it wasn’t), but because the fans reacted so extremely negatively to not getting to see Daniel Bryan actually wrestle that the WWE may be forced to recognize that he is actually very over (as opposed to acting embarrassed that they have hired and pushed him).

But WrestleMania mostly blew for two reasons.

1.) The WWE is either unable or unwilling to work at grooming new stars. WrestleMania’s two most important matches were A) between two guys who are inches away from retirement and B) featured someone who hasn’t wrestled regularly since 2003. Their big returns on the following RAW were Matt “Albert/Lord Tensai” Bloom (last seen in the WWE in 2004) and Brock Lesnar (ditto). I loved 2000-2004 WWE as much as anybody (indeed, I think it was probably the company’s creative and performance peak), but this is a well that has diminishing returns to say the least.

It used to be more straightforward: you had your A-level stars, your B-level stars, your C-level stars and your jobbers. When you wanted to “promote” a B-level star to A-level, it was simple: they beat an A-level star fairly and presto, they were in the club. Back in 2001, Chris Benoit and Chris Jericho were both mired in the midcard until they beat HHH and Steve Austin in a hot match. (Beating heels when heel tactics backfire on the heels is “fair.” Don’t look at me, I didn’t make the rules of wrestling storytelling.) This method works. Kurt Angle beats the Rock, Eddie Guerrero beats Brock Lesnar – presto, instantly credible World champions.

But nowadays, there are problems with this approach. Firstly, there aren’t many A-level stars (right now it’s probably CM Punk, John Cena, Chris Jericho, the Undertaker, HHH and Brock Lesnar now that he’s back – and Daniel Bryan is probably on the cusp) and the company is extremely careful to protect them. Secondly, there aren’t really a whole lot of well-defined B-level stars any more (right now I’d say the only real candidates are Kane, Mark Henry, the Miz, and Dolph Ziggler).1 Everybody else just sort of floats around in this morass of boredom and nobody really cares about them – call it the Kofi Kingston Zone. They’re just sort of there. Maybe they have a gimmick, but nobody cares about the gimmick. Heath Slater is the One Man Rock Band, but who gives a damn about that when Heath Slater matters less to the stories than Barry Horowitz ever did?

2.) The WWE has gradually stopped writing long-term plotlines. Partly this is because the WWE’s writers got tired of having to change their stories on the fly when a wrestler got injured, but that doesn’t really change the fact that going into WrestleMania, there was not one match that had a storyline that effectively went back more than a month. Rock/Cena doesn’t count, because that wasn’t an ongoing year of buildup to that match: Cena was doing other things (like feuding with Vince and/or CM Punk) for most of the year, and then Rock shows up for this one tag match, and then Cena fights Kane for two months just because, and… okay, Rock time now!

Or another example: another match on the card was Kane versus Randy Orton. Why were these two fighting? “Because.” That is literally the only reason – three weeks before WrestleMania Kane decided he hated Randy Orton. This is stupid. Never mind that there was a golden opportunity for the WWE to conclude or at least develop a longer storyline by having Kane fight Zack Ryder – you know, the guy Kane repeatedly brutalized during that feud with Cena I just mentioned. Plus, if they let Ryder go over Kane (and they should, because Kane is 44 and doesn’t have much gas left in him), they would elevate Ryder.

Really, long-term wrestling plotlines aren’t hard to write. You’ve got your classics (“escalating match stakes until things get insane,” “baddie runs away/cheats for seventeen thousand matches until good guy finally beats him,” et cetera), you can switch guys in and out, it’s not that hard. But the WWE has lost the knack for it.

1. The Big Show is sort of a special case because he is a giant, and giants play by slightly different rules because they can be instantly credible A-level stars whenever the company decides to have everybody suddenly realize “wait, this guy is seven feet tall.” Unless they are terrible like the Great Khali is. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

It’s become an overused and empty catchphrase with almost depressing speed; faced with sexist caricature after sexist caricature, feminist comics fans said that they wanted strong female characters as an alternative to women who serve no purpose other than to be the eye/arm-candy for male protagonists. And seemingly within days, every character was being described as a “strong female character”, from Ripley to Buffy to Catwoman to Lady Bullseye to X-23 to Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose. Because there are so many different kinds of strength and different ways to depict it, just about any character could be described as “strong” according to the writer’s personal lights, even while feminists continued to decry them as sexist caricatures. Which just led to a sort of hurt puzzlement among clueless male writers…after all, how could Lady Bullseye be considered “sexist”? She beats people up! Having read more than a few of these debates that always seem to trail off into anger on both sides, I thought I might present some of what I think are tangible, clearly-defined differences between actual strong female characters, and those just called “strong female characters”. Here are some of the characteristics of the “strong female”, as opposed to the actual strong female:

1) A “strong female character” is strictly limited in the scope of where she is allowed to be strong, usually to combat; she is strong, but she is not active. The best example I can think of for this particular trope is Cherry Darling, Robert Rodriguez’ supposedly strong character in ‘Planet Terror’. Certainly, she’s strong in one sense–she is able to kick lots of ass, mowing down dozens of zombies and Marines and zombified Marines in the film’s action climax. The ending of the film even shows her as the leader of the group of survivors. But when the film isn’t showing her shooting people and blowing people up and openly defying the laws of physics in various violent ways, it’s showing her…taking orders from El Wray, the male protagonist. He tells her to stop moping. He gives her both her wooden leg and her gun-leg. He practically drags her along through every scene of the movie. Even her final decision, to become the group’s charismatic leader and take them south to an easily defensible coastal region, comes from a scene where El Wray says, “Honey, time for you to become a charismatic leader by following my plan.” “Yessir.” She is never a decision maker, only an exceptional fighter. The two should not be conflated, and all too often are. (This is what John Scalzi referred to as “Spinny Killbot Syndrome”.)

2) A “strong female character” is strong in a way that does not threaten male gender roles. The implication that’s always given in these roles is that anytime women are anything other than helpless and simpering, they are automatically challenging sexist assertions and should be lauded for it. But the fact is, in practical terms, there is a strong societal belief that violence is perfectly acceptable for women under the right circumstances. Take Ripley, for instance. She is definitely seen as a feminist icon, and there’s certainly a lot of justification for that. But her most iconic scene is actually her least feminist; when she confronts the Queen Alien at the end of ‘Aliens’, it is with the intent of defending her surrogate daughter. It is automatically assumed, in fiction and in life, that a woman standing up for her family (her children, her husband) is going to use violence far more effectively and with less hesitation than a man would in the same situation, because her primal maternal instinct is aroused. The “Mama Grizzly” stereotype is every bit as sexist as the “Damsel in Distress”, even though one involves inflicting grievous bodily harm on people and the other involves helplessness in perilous situations. So are all the female characters who fight with determined efficiency while the battle is going on, only to faint when it ends because they’re so relieved, so are the femme fatales who vamp their way through combat. In ‘Aliens’, it’s Vasquez who is the truly challenging female character, determined to succeed better than men in their own field. (Unsurprisingly, people seem to prefer Ripley’s brand of “feminism”.)

3) A “strong female character” is either sexless or hypersexualized. The “virgin/whore” dichotomy is a classic complaint about the treatment of women in both fiction and life; female characters, it seems, are never to mention that they have body parts that produce orgasms or otherwise they’re supposed to be teases, sex kittens, vamps and sluts. Red Sonja is one example of the former; she’s a “strong female character” whose actual motto involves a vow of chastity to be enforced at swordpoint, while Catwoman gives us a view of the opposite extreme, a character who fights crime in a slinky catsuit and high heels. There’s very rarely a middle ground (and ironically, characters who inhabit it are all too frequently deemed “sexist”, because in the minds of many feminists, it’s better to fall on the “sexless” side of the divide than the “hypersexualized”. Slut shaming is all too common, even among people who know better. Of course, that isn’t to say that all sexual characters can be or should be defended by saying, “Oh, you’re just slut shaming!”. Sometimes hypersexualization is exactly what it appears to be, turning a female character into nothing more than an object of male lust. Are you listening, Scott Lobdell?)

4) A “strong female character” derives her strength from victimization. And speaking of Red Sonja, her origin story is par for the course for about two-thirds of female heroes…she was made helpless and victimized (“sexually” is often implied even if not outright stated), and she has made it her mission never to be helpless and victimized again. Lady Bullseye, Beatrix Kiddo…even X-23 has an element of pointless victimization grafted into her origin, as she apparently spent some time as a prostitute with an abusive pimp. When the female equivalent of Wolverine gets sexually abused, you know the trope is a little bit nuts. (By the way, it’s worth pointing out that the number of male heroes with the same element of victimization is exactly one: Batman. And he was a ten-year-old when it happened.)

And 5) a “strong female character” has an existence that revolves around the male protagonist. This is why I grew less and less enamored of River Song, even though I couldn’t articulate exactly why at the time. It’s because while she started as a mysterious archaeologist with a hidden past, she rapidly became “The Doctor’s assassin who became the Doctor’s lover who became the Doctor’s wife who became the Doctor’s murderer who became the Doctor’s Doctor’s Doctor’s…” While she’s active, competent in ways other than the merely physical, and has an active sex life but isn’t defined by it, she does come to be defined by her relationship to ther Doctor. Her story revolves around his, it does not cross it independently; this is all too common regarding “strong” women. (One of the biggest and most positive changes to Lois Lane was when she stopped trying to prove that Clark Kent was Superman so that she could marry him and started becoming an actual journalist.)

Now, appearing on this list does not immediately mean that a female character is sexist, or that their creators are sexist. Every character is on a journey that may involve them overcoming personal issues like those mentioned above (take River Tam, who moves from being passive to active over the course of a season of ‘Firefly’.) Some characters are meant to be flawed, but still admirable (River Song, for all that she has become obsessed with the Doctor, is nonetheless an active figure who refuses to blindly trust him or follow his orders.) If your character can check off a box on this list, it doesn’t mean you’ve made a huge mistake. (If they can check off all five, on the other hand…) But they are things worth discussing, and they are definitely things worth remembering when creating future female characters. Because an actual strong female character shouldn’t be that hard to create.

I’ve occasionally wondered if the MGK.com audience is interested in professional wrestling analysis, and I suppose there’s no better reason to test the waters than what Dave Meltzer calls “the biggest money-drawing pro-wrestling show of the last 130 years.”  (It is a little known fact that the Earp brothers and the Clanton gang actually settled their differences with a eight-man tag in front of a sellout crowd at the Tombstone Sportatorium.)

The sensibility that WrestleMania is a special show on the WWE calendar is somewhat artificial.  There’s no particular reason that WWE couldn’t save their biggest matches or their stadium events for, say, SummerSlam or Survivor Series.  But WrestleMania has an aura about it, primarily because of epic matches like Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant (1987), Hogan vs. Ultimate Warrior (1990), the Rock vs. Steve Austin series (1999/2001/2003), Hogan vs. the Rock (2002) and Shawn Michaels vs. the Undertaker (2009-2010).  For WrestleMania XXVIII, WWE is poised to deliver the same kind of big-time, clash-of-the-titans feeling with a main event the company has been hyping since about a month before WrestleMania XXVII.  It’s just that big!

John Cena vs. The Rock

I’m not sure the wrestling fandom has anticipated a match this much since Hogan and Andre.  For over a year I’ve heard serious discussion about whether fans in the Sun Life Stadium will riot if the Rock loses in his hometown.  There’s been tons of buildup for this one, as Rock and Cena have traded “is this a fake storyline or something more?” barbs at each other for years.  Ostensibly, the story is that Rock retired in 2004 to make movies, and now he feels like coming back but Cena resents that the “people’s champion” walked out on the people.  Recently the Rock has added the wrinkle that he wants to prove he’s the greatest of all time by becoming the only man to defeat Hulk Hogan, Steve Austin, and John Cena at WrestleMania.

The real story, though, is as follows:

1. The Rock was one of the biggest stars of one of WWE’s hottest eras.
2. John Cena is one of the biggest stars of the last 7-8 years.
3. Hardcore wrestling fans can’t fucking stand John Cena and want to see him die.
4. But nobody ever really beats John Cena when it counts because he’s a big star.
5. But  the Rock is a bigger star, and if anyone can get the job done, it’s him.

Basically, this match is every online Superman vs. Batman debate made manifest.  Up to and including the part where nobody notices that Batman is just Superman with a blue cape.

Who will win?  Let’s put it this way: WWE is hoping this will be the highest-grossing WrestleMania of all time, and very few people are paying to see the Rock lose.

Who should win?  My personal WrestleMania experience would be perfect if I could hear millions of butthurt Cena-haters wailing as one on April 1, so I’m rooting for John Cena.

continue reading "WrestleMania XXVIII Preview"

A lot of people have emailed me asking me for my take on the Trayvon Martin killing, and although I’ve kind of wanted to write about it at the same time I have not wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Mostly this is because I am A) white and B) not American, so I’m two steps removed from being able to make any truly cogent commentary – all of the greatest writing about this that I have read has come, not surprisingly, from black people trying to articulate why they’re mad about it, and I don’t know quite how to approach the enormity of the black experience in America from a doubly outside perspective. So this may not be searing eloquence here, is my point.

Sadly, I think the best way I can discuss it and why, this time at last, the anger from black people is not going away (and it isn’t, and it shouldn’t) starts with the context of The Hunger Games movie. Yes, I know I’m making a leap here that is seven-league-boots long, but bear with me, I’m just using it as a starting point. And yes, that means some spoilers for the movie based on a book which came out four years ago, so deal with it or don’t read.

One of my favorite things about the movie (which is good, but not perfect by any means) was how Alexander Ludwig played Cato at his death – the alpha-dog career Tribute is completely beside himself because he’s finally realized that the ruleset he’s internalized doesn’t apply. All his life he’d been trained to accept a reality where, sure, he’d have to kill some people, but it was part of an inevitable progression towards the life he imagined he was supposed to have and anyway those people didn’t matter. The consequences of being a tribute were never supposed to apply to him. He was following the rules, and optimizing himself to work within those rules, and although at his end he realizes that the rules were basically bullshit and were never going to guarantee him anything, he’s still trying to work within them even when he’s accepted the reality of his own imminent death because he’s internalized them so much that he can’t entirely believe that the rules aren’t going to step in and save him.

Okay, nerd digression over, we can stop talking about the movie now and go back to society. Society, for the most part, is the process of internalizing rules and accepting that following them is good. Usually these rules exist for good reasons. “Don’t kill people,” for example, is a good rule because it means if everybody follows it nobody will try to murder you, except rulebreakers, and then those rulebreakers run into “don’t break the rules” and they’re in trouble. Granted, sometimes there can be stupid rules, but luckily we have managed to advance society to the point where we can discuss and change the rules. This is about as good as society is gonna get unless we become telepathic.

Now – were I black and in America, I would be perpetually pissed off to begin with, because it’s quite evident that being black in America means you get a different set of rules than, say, white people do. But simply having an unfair set of extra rules isn’t really enough to get people really, really mad most of the time. (The civil rights struggle basically started after the Civil War ended and took nearly a century to get to the point where a majority of the black population was engaged, and it wasn’t because black people weren’t being treated like shit at the beginning of it.)

No – what gets you really mad is having the fact shoved in your face that not only do you have a different set of rules, but in fact that those rules don’t apply whenever someone feels like having them not apply for whatever reason. And even then, black people in the USA have been remarkably restrained. Amadou Diallo gets shot to death by cops and sure, people get pissed off, but there’s no real uprising. Sean Bell gets shot to death by cops and again – it’s an everyday thing, right? Cops shoot black people and get away with it. Black people got angry about Rodney King, but since then it’s been clear that nobody really gives a shit if cops beat up black people for no good reason and that gets internalized as one of the rules, so it becomes perceived as less of a big deal (on some level) when Diallo or Bell gets shot.

But Trayvon Martin pushes the envelope too far again, because his killing was so much more extreme. He was a kid, for starters. He wasn’t shot by cops, but by some random idiot with a gun who didn’t even get arrested. When the conflict started he walked away. These facts are not in dispute.

(Naturally, this means conservatives have started trying to justify Trayvon’s death, which tells you all you need to know about modern American conservatism. Liberals get angry about a senseless murder, so conservatives decide that the murder must have been proper because liberals are angry about it. Trayvon deserved to die because he was 17 and not the little kid who shows up in all those photos in the media! He deserved to die because when he was pursued by someone with a gun he may have fought back! He deserved to die because he was suspended from school for having a plastic bag, traditionally used to hold pot! This is what modern conservatism has come to: demonizing a dead kid for being in the wrong place and the wrong time.)

This is a new level of disrespect for black people who followed the rules – as unfair as those rules might be. Part of internalizing rules is accepting the fact that if you break the rules you will be punished, and even if the rules aren’t fair you can at least always follow them and stay safe from punishment – which, for black people, is often lethal. But the moral of the Trayvon Martin killing is that the rules never existed in the first place and indeed will just be revised as necessary (and retroactively if need be) to make sure that anything is justifiable under the rules. That’s why the anger isn’t going away this time. It’s why I hope it continues to not go away.

Because, seriously. 17.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Every time I hear about Geraldo Rivera’s comments on the Trayvon Martin shootings, I always picture him talking to the victim’s family. I picture him sitting there, an expression of Sincere Concern on his face (the one he’s practiced over years of TV “journalism”), perhaps putting a hand on one family member’s knee in a sort of “There, there” gesture. And I picture him trying to explain the position he’s apparently decided is the sensitive, honest and concerned stance to take.

“Yes,” he says, “on the one hand, George Zimmerman did hunt down and kill your unarmed son in cold blood after being instructed by police not to follow him. That’s certainly half the problem. But just as importantly, well…your son wasn’t exactly dressed formally, was he? I think we have to place at least as much of the blame on your son’s clothing choices as we do on the decisions of the raving paranoid who followed your son down the street and then shot him in broad daylight. If he hadn’t been so, well…slovenly…then I feel that there was a very good chance that Zimmerman might have decided your child was ‘one of the good ones’, and left him alone. We’ll never know, of course, but I think that if black people don’t follow the unspoken dress code that white people have decided on for you, then any consequences of that are really on your own head. But, you know, I’m not blaming your bad parenting or your son’s sloppy dress choices. You just didn’t know that wearing a hooded sweatshirt in a nice neighborhood was a possible death sentence for a young black man. Now that you’re aware, I’m sure that you and all your kind will remember your place from now on, and unfortunate incidents like this won’t happen again.”

And he wonders why someone hit him in the face with a chair once…

Only serious flaw is that without Katniss’ internal monologue, the moments where Katniss is acting badly will come across as Jennifer Lawrence acting badly to those unfamiliar to the source material.

Yesterday on Twitter, Tim O’Neill wrote that the best Twitter bot name he had seen yet was “Charsky Troublefield.” This is, no question, a great name.

However, I pointed out that in real life, about a decade ago when Columbia House was still a thing, my roommates and I received more than a few pieces of direct-mail marketing directed at “Goat Slywinkle,” which I staunchly maintain to be the best fake name created for illicit commercial gain of all time. (Fake Columbia House identities were the Neanderthal equivalent of spambot names.) Indeed, for a time one of my roommates registered slywinkle.com, until he got bored with it.) I keep meaning to use ol’ Goat in a story somewhere, but his name is so outrageous that it requires the proper character and he hasn’t shown up yet.

Tim then attempted to counter Goat with his personal favorite spam name, which was “Rbassus Obassman.” I think this does not come close to “Goat Slywinkle.” Your mileage may vary.

So, I throw it open to the floor: the best spam name (or fake record club name, or what have you) that you have ever seen?

So I have maintained for quite some time now that Jonathan Hickman’s Fantastic Four run is, increasingly, one of the truly definitive runs on the title. To my mind it’s surpassed Walt Simonson’s run and John Byrne’s1 and is quietly creeping up on Waid/Ringo, which while a great run certainly had a few rough patches in it (like, for example, the middle bit).

I spoke about Hickman’s run on the title a while back when FF #1 came out that Hickman was delivering what ongoing superhero comics needed: the illusion of change. And his run on the title has certainly demonstrated his commitment to the “illusion” part, as with the apparent conclusion of a major storyline we have seen the return of the Human Torch following his supposed death23 and the upcoming issues tease the departure of Spider-Man from the team (which is of course perfectly reasonable). But, at the same time, he’s developed Franklin and Valeria further and added an enormous supporting cast – none of which changes the core tenets of the book, but which create enough surface difference to add novelty. And that should be appreciated.

But what I really love about Hickman’s Fantastic Four is that at first, people thought all of his Big Idea Comic Stories were just Morrison-lite, because these days anybody who puts actual ideas on the page is copying Grant Morrison or something like that. But unlike Morrison – who tends to use his freeflowing conduit of mad ideas as set dressing – Hickman has consistently used his Big Ideas as elements of his ongoing, overarcing plot rather than just discarding them as one-offs, culminating in his most recent story arc which features enemies that were barely present for a couple of panels twenty issues ago and features the culmination of plots from the very beginning of Hickman’s run.

And he writes a truly great Dr. Doom – Hickman’s Doom isn’t noble in a heroic way (which he shouldn’t be), but Hickman rightly notes that Doom’s pride makes him capable of great things at times (which should be the case).

In all seriousness, at this point I think I would rank Hickman’s work on the book above everybody who isn’t Stan and Jack. (I’m sure there will be those willing to contest this statement heartily. Have at it.)

1. I have always felt that Byrne’s FF run is somewhat overrated, particularly because I don’t like his portrayal of Dr. Doom. Doom is not noble; Doom is a clever bastard. [↩]
2. Spoilers: a valuable intellectual property and lynchpin of one of the most important superhero teams in comics was not killed off forever! [↩]
3. Although you have to admire the fact that Hickman’s solution to “how not to kill him” was in fact to kill him repeatedly but keep bringing him back with Evil Science, which is a deliciously nasty way to go about it. [↩]