You were once the most powerful villain. You retired early and are engaged to a minor super hero who isn’t aware of your past. They are about to be killed right before your eyes..but you step in.
She asks him why maybe a dozen times before they decide to get married. It’s not hard to figure out where he goes in the little hours of the morning, not hard to follow him to the edges of forests and abandoned towns and deserts, not hard to smell the spandex, blood and sweat that he wears home. He’s always got bags under his eyes and dirt under his nails and the blood that stains their welcome mat is more often his than not.
So she asks him why before they decide to get married because for all her mysteries, she can’t have him be one.
(Hypocrite isn’t the worst name she’s ever been called.)
He hardly looks surprised at the question, lips quirking as his fingers find the condensation on the glass in front of him. He runs his forefinger up the side, the move thoughtlessly seductive, before drawing it away. The water follows, a thin stream of twisting molecules for a long moment before the tension snaps and it forms a circle hovering above the pad of his finger.
“I may not be a Superhero,” he says, “or even a hero. But when I needed someone, when I really needed someone, a superhero was there. It’s an amazing thing to experience. The rescue. The salvation. It’s…indescribable. It makes you thankful in way you didn’t know you could be.” He allows the water to drop to the diner table and gives her a warm, nostalgic smile. “I want everyone to have that, even if it’s just some guy in a mask with a spray of water at his command. I became Zone for that and I’ve never regretted it. Not once. ”
She’s surprised by the moisture gathering at the corners of her eyes. She hasn’t cried in public for years, normally doesn’t even have to worry about the possibility after years of being on guard. That’s what’s special about Gannon; he makes her feel vulnerable and safe all at once. Comforted. Able to exist within herself, at peace.
She reaches past her empty breakfast plate to cover his hand with her hot palm. The smile she returns is new, her most precious treasure and something she’d never think twice about giving him.
I’d been wanting to bring Mom to a comics convention for a long time. I wanted to show her what I do, and the community I’ve helped build; and to share parts of my life that usually don’t intersect with my family. I wanted her to get to see stuff I knew she’d think was cool.
And I really, really wanted to dress her up as Cable; for reasons that I assume are obvious to anyone who’s now seen her in the costume, plus the fact that Second Coming-era Cable is basically Mom’s own aesthetic dialed up to eleven.
Mom was super nervous about it at first–in particular, she was worried that she was too old or too short or too fat or would generally look silly or like an interloper. We talked a lot about cosplay, and why people do it; and found some photos of women of roughly her build cosplaying Cable and killing it. (As for “old,” I’m pretty sure a 62-year-old is closer to Cable’s canon age than are most people who cosplay him.)
Also, I promised her that if she’d go as Cable, I’d do the heavy-construction parts of her costume and go with her as Rule-63 Hope.
So, Saturday morning, we met up early, got dressed, painted on her scar, and headed to the convention center. I snapped and tweeted a couple photos of her while we were waiting for the elevator. And then thishappened. Josh Brolin, eat your heart out.
A few notes WRT common responses and frequently-asked questions, since at this point there are too many for me to reply individually:
-The response has been overwhelmingly positive, which is awesome. I know the Internet–I work on the Internet–and it’s been very cool (and a huge relief) seeing y’all turn out to tell my mom how rad she is.
-Yes, she is that badass IRL: she is a biker and teaches at an alternative middle school, and would generally be a pretty good pick to keep a kid safe in a dystopian future.
-She had an awesome time at ECCC. I’m pretty sure she got photos of every cosplayer she saw; and I got a ton of Good Son points for introducing her to Ryan North, which absolutely made her weekend.
-If you want to send her a note, I will (probably) be happy to pass it along. Don’t be creepy.
-We would fucking love to see fan art of this.
– @teaberryblue and I made the arm; it’s aluminum tape over foam, weathered with acrylic paint. I made the gun (modded from this), along with both cloaks and my Hope costume. Mom brought her own impeccable Cable glower.
-Both costumes are from Second Coming. Mom’s is pretty much page-accurate; mine is significantly redesigned.
-To the roughly infinite people who tried to be funny and original by posting variations on “LOL is she cosplaying a Florida teacher”: She is actually a teacher in Florida, and, like most Florida teachers, emphatically pro-gun control. You’re not funny. Fuck off.
-To everyone who kinda wants to cosplay but thinks they’re not the right age/build/gender/whatever: Do it anyway, and fuck the haters. ❤
Hi, Jay! Hi, Jay’s mom!
Jay’s mom sounds like a fucking champ. Where’s her podcast?
I have tried to get her on @xplainthexmen multiple times, thus far with no success. =(
(Her podcast would be about woodworking and motorcycles and maybe also radical ecology.)
* who has shipped Spirk since that night in 1967 that Amok Time first aired * and helped storm NBC to keep TOS on the air for a 3rd season * and wrote fanfic way back in the day * and was privileged to be around for the earliest days of fandom, when Leonard used to come to your house if that’s where the fan club was meeting and sit on the sofa with you in that Spock hair cut and eat cake
All of you who are writing TOS/AOS fan fiction and creating fan art now: remember, YOU are the ones shaping the traditions of fandom. You have inherited the kingdom. Bless you for keeping it vibrant, growing, alive. In fifty years, you will be the ones who are remembered for molding it and handing it down to the future. It probably doesn’t feel like now, but you are making history.
Your current addiction to TOS and the feels you get when you contemplate the love between Jim and Spock will be with you for life. It won’t always be in the forefront; you will sometimes go years, sometimes go a decade, without Star Trek being more than a passing thought. But then something will remind you and every consuming feeling you feel right now will come rushing back, every bit as powerful and deep and strong as it is today. All there, right where you left it.
The friendships you make in fandom will be with you for life. Like all friendships, they will wax and wane as the focus of your life shifts over time, but you will always be able to pick up the thread. You will — to give you a hypothetical example — be 77 years old and discover Tumblr and get a rush of Spirk feels after a decade of not giving TOS a thought, and contact your 83-year-old fangirl friend in the nursing home, to whom you haven’t spoken in several years. You will open the conversation with, “So, Jim and Spock love each other and that just makes me so happy.” And your friend in the nursing home will sigh and say, “Yes. They do love each other. It’s such a comfort.”
That look that Jim and Spock give each other, of absolute adoration and acceptance and love? That’s real. It’s rare, but it’s real. One of my greatest joys in life is to see my son and his husband give each other looks like that. Of course I don’t know you; I don’t know your strengths and struggles or your place on the spectrum of gender or anything about your sexuality or what you look like or what your life has taught you to believe about yourself, but I do know this: YOU DESERVE TO BE LOVED AND LOOKED AT THE WAY JIM AND SPOCK LOOK AT EACH OTHER. Please don’t accept less than that in your life.
The future of our planet does not seem very hopeful at the moment. But please remember that when Gene created Star Trek, the world was in turmoil and the future seemed very bleak. Star Trek is, was, always shall be about hope. Reach for it. When TOS first aired, we hoped to see some form of a Starfleet on the horizon in our lifetimes. That vision must be passed on to you. Do it. Make the world worthy of launching the human race out into space. CREATE STARFLEET.
You are all creative and funny and amazing. Far more amazing than you know. Be kind to yourselves. Live long and prosper, kids.
Tags are in reference to my first bullet point. Meant as a kudos to your work, but feel free to untag yourself if you don’t want to be linked to my ramblings; I won’t be offended! (Also, this extends to a thousand other artists and writers out there who deserve kudos. tag at will.)
Aren’t you glad that this woman didn’t leave fandom once she graduated college/got a job/got married/had kids?
a lot of young people say that fanfic made them think abuse was okay, and I think it’s disingenuous to say they’re all lying. but why is this suddenly a problem? this is my theory as to why it’s no longer an understood thing that fandom is about fiction & fantasy.
“society tells them that’s the job of ‘women’ but fandom wasn’t being a mom, and if they weren’t safe it was fandom’s fault”
Like what I’ve been saying: at base, this is a technology problem.
The stacks are not friends to your mental health. They’re not designed to make privacy or safety or DL;DR easy: people yelling at each other bc they saw something they shouldn’t have is still eyeballs and engagement = money.
(Also, the fact is, back in the day just the reality that fandom was full of LGBT was a sign that the content therein was “freaky.” Geekiness in general was stigmatized, let alone female geekiness. You could get sued or fired for participation. So the baseline assumption for entering and taking away was different, like walking into a private kink club versus a coffee shop.
Now, geekiness is valorized, LGBT has a much greater degree of acceptance, and fanfic is mainstream. So to a younger fan, why wouldn’t all of it be assumed coffee-shop innocuous?)
During a year marked by social and political turmoil, the media has found itself under scrutiny from politicians, academics, the general public, and increasingly self-reflexive journalists and editors. Fake news has entered our lexicon both as a form of political meddling from foreign powers and a dismissive insult directed towards any less-than-complimentary news coverage of the current administration.
Paying attention to where people are getting their news and what that news is telling them is an important step to understanding our increasingly polarized society and our seeming inability to talk across political divides. The insight can also help us get at those important and oh-too common questions of “how could they think that?!?” or “how could they support that politician?!?”
My interest in this topic was sparked a few months ago when I began paying attention to the top four stories and single video that magically appear whenever I swipe left on my iPhone. The stories compiled by the Apple News App provide a snapshot of what the dominant media sources consider the newsworthy happenings of the day. After paying an almost obsessive attention to my newsfeed for a few weeks—and increasingly annoying my friends and colleagues by telling them about the compelling patterns I was seeing—I started to take screenshots of the suggested news stories on a daily or twice daily basis. The images below were gathered over the past two months.
It is worth noting that the Apple News App adapts to a user’s interests to ensure that it provides “the stories you really care about.” To minimize this complicating factor I avoided clicking on any of the suggested stories and would occasionally verify that my news feed had remained neutral through comparing the stories with other iPhone users whenever possible.
Some of the differences were to be expected—People simply cannot get enough of celebrity pregnancies and royal weddings. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN frequently feature stories that are critical of the current administration, and Fox News is generally supportive of President Trump and antagonistic towards enemies of the Republican Party.
However, there are two trends that I would like to highlight:
1) A significant number of Fox News headlines offer direct critiques of other media sites and their coverage of key news stories. Rather than offering an alternative reading of an event or counter-coverage, the feature story undercuts the journalistic work of other news sources through highlighting errors and making accusations of partisanship motivations. In some cases, this even takes the form of attacking left-leaning celebrities as proxy to a larger movement or idea. Neither of these tactics were employed by any of the other news sources during my observation period.
2) Fox News often featured coverage of vile, treacherous, or criminal acts committed by individuals as well as horrifying accidents. This type of story stood out both due to the high frequency and the juxtaposition to coverage of important political events of the time—murderous pigs next to Senate resignations and sexually predatory high school teachers next to massively destructive California wildfires. In a sense, Fox News is effectively cultivating an “asociological” imagination by shifting attention to the individual rather than larger political processes and structural changes. In addition, the repetitious coverage of the evil and devious certainly contributes to a fear-based society and confirms the general loss of morality and decline of conservative values.
It is worth noting that this move away from the big stories of the day also occurs through a surprising amount of celebrity coverage.
From the screen captures I have gathered over the past two months, it seems apparent that we are not just consuming different interpretations of the same event, but rather we are hearing different stories altogether. This effectively makes the conversation across political affiliation (or more importantly, news source affiliation) that much more difficult if not impossible.
I recommend taking time to look through the images that I have provided on your own. There are a number of patterns I did not discuss in this piece for the sake of brevity and even more to be discovered. And, for those of us who spend our time in the front of the classroom, the screenshot approach could provide the basis for a great teaching activity where the class collectively takes part in both the gathering of data and conducting the analysis.
Kyle Green is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Utica College. He is a proud TSP alumnus and the co-author /co-host of Give Methods a Chance.
Comas: Please use coma tropes wisely. Long-term comas are damaging to the human body. The chances of anyone becoming fully functional after a brain injury related coma become much slimmer after 4 MONTHS. Having someone wake up from a coma after YEARS is pretty unrealistic. Having them at all cognitively functional, much less *immediately,* is nigh impossible (unless magic/supernatural is involved). For this reason, the medical community strongly recommends “pulling the plug” on long term coma patients. It is thus VERY unlikely a family would be able to keep a coma patient alive more than a year (much less 4 or 6) without BUCKETS of money and power. Really, it’s a writing faux pas to do this-really breaks suspension of disbelief.
INSTEAD, consider CATATONIA.
If you want a character tragically out of the way for a long (indefinite) period of time, from which they CAN come back fully, try institutionalized for “catatonia”. This is a symptom caused by a very wide variety of things, including PTSD, brain injury, and severe illness. It has several forms, including a hyperactive one and one with repetitive motions. It can be ameliorated by treatment, but cured only by addressing the underlying cause. For PTSD, it is possible (but rare) for the brain to simply ‘heal’ and give you that sudden recovery you may be looking for. It is also medically proven that some people do perceive the outside world while catatonic. Lastly, some folks can have intermittent catatonia (usually triggered) with unpredictable and intermittent participation in the world.
So- writing tip for the day: for a more believable long term uncommunicative-must-be-institutionalized medical issue, go with CATATONIA rather than coma.
I now return you (and I) to our regular fanfic reading and writing activities.
I tend to get a tad ranty (at least internally) when I see amnesia portrayed in fics.
Amnesia due to some type of brain injury:
The vast majority (and I mean VAST majority) of cases of amnesia caused by some neurological event are characterized by the inability to make NEW memories. Old, well-laid down memories of who you are and who your family is and what you did a year ago are well-established and highly resilient in any type of neurological injury.
After some type of acquired brain injury, some of the more recent memories that weren’t quite fully laid down can be gone, but that’s only the case in SEVERE injuries (read: included a coma of a day or more) and the further in time you go back the less of a chance of losing that memory.
If you’ve ever interacted with someone with really dense amnesia due to a neurological event it is very much like talking to Dory from Finding Nemo. Their ability to pick up on context cues is intact. So after about 20 to 30 minutes of talking to them they’ve forgotten anything you told them when you first got together and the purpose for you coming to see them, but it’s almost like they’re watching a movie that started in the middle of the action and are picking up cues and kinda just going with it. It’s not until you ask them something specific about what you talked about earlier or the purpose of the conversation, or they start repeating themselves, that their lack of new recall becomes apparent. People with really dense amnesia don’t often know that they have amnesia – because they tend to live life in 20 to 30 minute increments.
BUT, amnesia is a phenomena related to CONSCIOUS memories and we have other memory systems that operate just fine during amnesia. Procedural memory tends to remain intact, so someone with amnesia can learn a new series of actions involved in a simple skill, as long as they’ve practiced it often enough. Other types of implicit/associative memory also tends to remain intact – leaving people with amnesia with a general sense of positive or negative feelings associated with specific people, situations, or activities depending on how many times positive or negative experiences have been associated with that particular trigger. If a dense amnesia goes on long enough, you can see changes in mood as massed experiences of confusion and feeling lost add up.
People with amnesia that isn’t as dense – they’re making new memories intermittently – are often very distressed. They’re going to most often remember things that had strong emotions associated with them – and that’s most often going to be painful emotional experiences like not being allowed to do things that they’re used to doing because they’re not safe to do them anymore. They’ve picked up on the fact that things are not quite right, but don’t have enough specific recall of new events to remember all those things people do around them to help them understand what is going on and to give them hope and purpose. This is common after severe anoxic brain injuries (e.g., near drownings, suicide attempts through hanging, cardiac arrest, status epilepticus, carbon monoxide poisoning). And let me tell you, it is an incredibly painful situation for everyone involved.
Amnesia involving loss of memories related to identity:
Loss of memory about who you are is a psychological phenomenon – not related to a physical injury – referred to as Dissociative Amnesia. It can be “localized” in the sense that only certain aspects of identity or periods of time are lost, “generalized” in the sense that broad swathes of things related to the person’s identity are lost, or a “fugue” which includes generalized loss of memories associated with identity, adopting a new identity, and often travel to a different location and starting a new life.
Memory Phenomena that have some interesting fic potential:
Capgras Syndrome: In which you recognize the familiar person or place in the abstract, but lack that jolt of emotional recognition. The brain then interprets that situation as: if they look like my mother, but don’t emotionally feel like my mother, therefore they must be an IMPOSTER – someone has replaced my mother. It is a disorder of our visual recognition system and can be related to brain injury or dementia. So, hearing the person’s voice over the phone doesn’t trigger the “IMPOSTER” response, only seeing the person. Here are also some tips for how to help manage the impact on day to day life. I’ve run into someone with this syndrome a couple of times. In my experience, as long as you aren’t directly confronting someone about the fact that they are wrong or challenging something that they want to do based on their misperception, they are surprising blase about the whole thing. As long as it isn’t creating a problem for them right here and now, they don’t tend to make a big deal about it. (As in: “Hey, how was your weekend?” “Fine. I was in a different hospital this weekend.” “You were? Where’d you go?” “I mean it looked just like this one and the nurses looked the same, but it was a different hospital, and then we came here.” Spoiler: they’ve been in the same hospital room for the past two weeks.)
Prosopagnosia (aka Face Blindness): in which you can’t recognize someone from their face. It can be due to an acquired injury or can be developmental in origin. I’ve met a few people with this condition, and they tell me that after a family member has been away for a few hours they don’t immediately recognize them when they come back. It takes a while for the voice and a few distinct physical features to reassure them that, yes, that is my mom or other familiar person. They are also completely thrown when someone alters a distinctive feature, like gets a haircut or shaves a beard. The people I’ve met with face blindness know that it’s a odd experience and it kind of weirds them out, but usually find ways to work around it.
Transient global amnesia: a form of Dissociative Amnesia often brought on by acute stress. “During an episode of transient global amnesia, your recall of recent events simply vanishes, so you can’t remember where you are or how you got there. In addition, you may not remember anything about what’s happening in the here and now. Consequently, you may keep repeating the same questions because you don’t remember the answers you’ve just been given. You may also draw a blank when asked to remember things that happened a day, a month or even a year ago.With transient global amnesia, you do remember who you are, and recognize the people you know well.” It tends to resolve over a day or so, and the ability to make new memories returns. A friend’s mother experienced this once after she had an emotional shock. Luckily, my friend was from work and she knew how to just keep answering her questions, re-orienting her to what was going on, not challenging her errors if she didn’t need to, and keeping her occupied. They were in the ER and every once in a while, her mother would pat her on the knee and say something along the lines of, “Honey, everything’s going to be okay, I’m sure the doctor will be along soon.” She’d pick up on the context cues of being in the hospital, the fact that she was there with her daughter, and fall into the role of mother reassuring what she thought was her sick child. This really reflects the fact that we interpret context cues in very personal ways in the absence of specific information about what’s going on.
Well. That went on longer than I thought when I first started out, so maybe, perhaps, a bit more than “a tad” ranty.
Hearseeno 