So, I saw Fringe, Season 2, Episode 2. In it, evil!Charlie has a bigger role than skepticop. In fact, I’m not even sure she was in the episode, and I’m definitely sure that she didn’t matter. I can see why they had to kill off Charlie; he’s a close character who had the least visibly important role (as Olivia’s partner who was never really around), but I think it would have been more interesting if skepticop had been the one that got replaced. That way, you’re not eliminating Charlie’s mentor/brother role, and your new character (who has been pointless for the past two episodes) has a reason to be around.

Also, whenever someone gets replaced in a tv show, someone else eventually notices that the evil person isn’t acting quite right. With skepticop, no one knows her, so any personality change wouldn’t be noticed. By introducing evil!Charlie and killing off Charlie!Alpha (Fringe Universe’s Charlie; The other universe’s Charlie!Beta still exists as far as we know.), we’ve introduced the standard “I’m not who I am and you’ll find out because I’m different” cliche. I hate cliches. It would have made sense for skepticop to be the bad lady, since she’s new, and in adding her as the villain, we don’t lose anything, but by trading Charlie!Alpha for evil!Charlie, we’ve lost that mentor role, which is frustrating to me.

I would really enjoy it if we discovered that the agent is in fact Charlie!Beta, but I’m really sad that they chose to kill Charlie!Alpha off so fast. After only one season, this good, likeable guy gets killed off and replaced all cliche-like. Every time we see him from now on, there’s going to be evilscary music, and we’re going to be reminded that a guy we like died for no really good reason.

So I was chatting with a friend the other day, and she read my “Be Different” post. Interestingly, I’d forgotten that the pit thing was originally her idea, not mine. It’s kind of embarrassing when stuff like that happens; you see or hear something, and then years later forget exactly where it came from, and presume that it must be you. Sure, I might have developed the idea further, but the idea was originally hers, which brings me to an interesting question: “Do creators have the right to claim something as their own if someone else took their idea and ran with it?” Naoki Urasawa has actually written about this question in his manga Billy Bat, and the Kirby family is suing Marvel comics for the rights to all of their characters, including Spider-Man, for whom Jack Kirby had drawn some art (some of his ideas may have been retained in the story by Lee  and Ditko, but Lee and Kirby had worked on Kirby’s sketch… so no one’s really sure how much influence, if any, Kirby had on Spider-Man).

Anywho, sorry to Chiaki/Ilhan for taking credit for what was originally her idea. I’d completely forgotten where it came from.

The Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ superhero epic that allegedly changed the world, is not nearly as important as everyone claims it is. In some cases, it is downright bad. Earlier tonight, I was browsing io9 in an attempt to find out the title and author of a comic book that I couldn’t remember (found it later; it was Fletcher Morrison’s “You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!”), and I came across an article on The Watchmen. A shocking number of people really seem to like it, and I have no clue why.

When I was first getting in to comics back in 2006, I discovered Wizard’s list of 100 best Trade Paperbacks, and thought I’d go ahead and read the Watchmen. After all, V for Vendetta had recently been released, and while I hadn’t seen the movie, I had read the comic book and liked it quite a bit. Another book by the same guy? Oh, there was no doubt in my mind that it would be great. But… it wasn’t. Actually, it was pretty disappointing and self-indlugent, its meticulous attention to detail and the characterization of Rohrshach aside. Yet time and time again, I hear comics fans proclaiming it as the best comic ever written. Now the movie’s come out and failed, and nerds can’t help but wonder just why this is, and I can’t help but wonder how they could be so deluded.

Although they won’t admit it, most fandoms are insecure about their existence and feel the need to be validated by popular culture. Comic books are consitently seen as a childish, unintelligent art form that no serious person would ever consider reading critically. The Watchmen was different, though. It made it on to several best-of lists and even won a Hugo award. Comic fans have since become obsessed with idea that the Watchmen has had some sort of influence on popular culture, with Alan Moore actually claiming that Watchmen was part of a culture of 80s comic books that shaped modern popular culture. Here’s the reality of the situation, though: after it was published, the world pretty much forgot about The Watchmen.

The Watchmen was a book about superheroes, which are really only relevant within the comic book sub-culture and, to a small degree, Hollywood. It was a poorly-written mystery story that attempted to give the world realistic superheroes. The biggest problem that Moore faced when he wrote it, though, was that “realistic” apparently only meant “dark and sexual.” Asking who in their right mind would dress up in garish costumes is a fair question, sure, but Moore took it to the darkest places he could, when he didn’t really need to. Batman dressed up like a bat to scare the crap out of people, but most superheroes were simply characters inspired by Superman, who wore an outfit that was designed partly to make him stand out, and partly to make his costume seem alien. Superheroes were bright and shiny characters, living in fantastic world of wild colors and larger than life creatures. Moore wasn’t deconstructing superheroes. He was fucking them up.

The story itself was pretty bad, and in spite of its 12-issue length, I feel pretty comfortable recapping the thing in one paragraph. Basically, someone killed a hero named the Comedian, because the Comedian had figured out what that someone was planning. Unfortunately, the omnipotent Doctor Manhattan was unable to see this, because in spite of his god-powers, someone was shooting a lot of neturinoes or something at him, and this kept him from seeing the future. Anyways, the story winds through the different pasts of all the characters, while also telling how Rohrshach, the only superhero who didn’t STOP being a superhero when the politicians made it illegal, finally figures out who the bad guy is and what his motives are. Turns out that one of the other superheroes was planning to (and succeeded) kill a bunch of people in order to stop the cold war, by making humanity band together against a united front. Oh yeah, and he also made Manhattan leave the galaxy so that no one would be left to stop him.

Okay, there are a lot of problems with that. Never mind the bad science behind the neutrinos/time bit, because for all we know, it was a reference to the bad science that is all-too common in comic books. Let’s work on the people bit. Still, Doctor Manhattan’s character is relatively interesting, so let’s focus on him for a bit. The whole point throughout the comic is that Manhattan is slowly drifting further and further away from humanity; in fact, he’s pretty much an entirely alien being in the first issue. Hell, he even makes a big point about how death doesn’t really matter (which is kind of odd, given that dead people don’t posess sentience, and sentience is an incalculably rare thing indeed), but the moment he’s confronted with an ex (who he dumped, by the way) who is dying from cancer, he freaks out and goes to the moon, where he has a flashback about his origin story (thus allowing us as readers to learn where he came from), then starts being cold and distant again, and finally decides he’ll go play god and make some of his own life somewhere else. Moore seems to find himself incapable of determining whether or not Manhattan is human or not, switching him between human and inhuman solely to try to move the plot forward. There is no logic to his actions, no genuine humanity in the character.

Ozymandias, the smartest man in The Watchmen’s world, apparently thinks that he can create world peace by scaring the shit out of everyone. He makes a guess that the death of millions might cause humanity to band together against some unseen threat, because of our instinctive drive for survival. To his credit, that is very likely what would have happened, except that someone was eventually bound to find out what he had done and humanity would have ended up right back where it started. Even if no one found out, you can only cry wolf for so long, and unless he genuinely threatened the earth, it is unlikely that humanity would remain united against such a perceived threat forever.

Look, it’s possible that since the creature only “attacked” New York, it might not be as hostile against the Communist nations (if you look at a list of human rights-violating nations, you’ll find that Communist nations are usually the worst; if not, it’s Islamic ones), and they might band together in an attempt to stop it. In fact, it’s conceivable that in their human foolishness, the Soviet Union, the Chinese, and the other Communists would not only band together, but actually use it as an excuse to assault the West. If that was the case, it’s entirely plausible that Ozymandias would have made the world worse than he found it.

Hell, for all the humans know (especially if they waited several years after the events of the Watchmen and the ruse was not discovered), the supposed alien creature was flying through space and crashed into New York and accidentally killed people. I can’t actually think of a single outcome where humanity would band together forever and Ozymandias really ends up having saved the world. If anything, he only managed to delay the inevita–oh. Wait. See, here’s the thing.

Humanity didn’t destroy itself.

Here it is, 2009, and humanity is still spreading across the face of the earth. Sure, there is still violence and chaos and wars and stuff, but how much of that is going to result in an apocalyptic destruction of the planet? Remember what I said about humanity’s survival instinct? We as a species are incredibly survival-oriented, which the reason why the human race does a pretty good job of keeping itself alive. We’re built for it. It’s hard-wired in us. Cannibalism and murder are often viewed as morally wrong simply because those activities, if wide-spread, would jeapordize the human race. People who kill often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and humans typically find it hard to kill another human being. We don’t eat our babies (and some would argue, have a built-in drive to protect them) because it would hurt our future as a species.

The Cold War happened, but it never would have become World War Three. Humanity would not have wiped itself from the surface of the planet. Ozymandias killed a bunch of people for no reason. If World War Three had happened, then I suppose Moore would have been right, and the moral that the story had been building up to for twelve issues would have been justified. It wasn’t, though. I remember thinking this after I read The Watchmen, and earlier this year, I read the same sentiment in a movie review, which went something along the lines of: “What does The Watchmen matter? The point that this film was trying to make was that people are all screwed up and that we’ll destroy each other if we don’t look out. But we aren’t all and we’re better off now than we were a hundred years ago.”

I really don’t give a rat’s ass about how good the deconstruction in Watchmen supposedly is. Okay, so he’s got an issue that mirrors its paneling structure, and he quotes a lot of poems, and the book’s got a lot of literary/comic influences. The story itself doesn’t hold up, and if the story doesn’t hold up, then it can’t be the greatest comic of all time. Just look at how many movies are well-made but have poor stories. Look at Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which is a meticulously crafted tale with one of the dumbest scripts I’ve heard. Hell, the relationship between Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II was artificial and juvenile, written as if Moore didn’t understand how humans worked–Well, that’s the way all of his comics are. None of his characters have really seemed truly human or organic; they’re as genuine as Shinji from Evangelion or Mikaela from Transformers. A good writer understands humanity and displays this understanding in their works; this is why William Shakespeare is considered the best writer in the English language, if not the best writer of all time. Moore’s characters, on the other hand, are stiff and contrived things that really only exist to move his plots forward. Sure, you’ll get the occasional Evey, but she’s an exception to the rule.

I’ll be 21 soon.

I’ll be all grown up, to hear my parents talk about it. I’m not really sure how you can wake up one morning and suddenly be a mature adult, but I think I’ve done a pretty good job of things. I hold down a job, I’m making my payments, I keep myself showered and my clothes cleaned without needing to be told to (sometimes, my mom tries to wake me up an hour after I’ve already woken up, but that’s more her failing than it is mine). Soon, I’ll be a full-fledged adult. Will things really be that different? Will I really have evolved into something that’s serious all the time? Will I become someone who doesn’t crack jokes or tell stories or enjoy the beautiful colors in life? Will I really have to become a tie-wearing office drone who does nothing but work all the time? If my parents have ever taught me, it’s been by example, and all they’ve ever lead me to believe is that adults are joyless, miserable people who exist solely to work all the time, unless, of course, they’re sleeping?

Is it really that immature of me to crack a joke about wanting to get a career in television just so I can answer the phones at my local PBS station during pledge drives? If I’m the one making plans about where I want to go and what I want to do, and working up budgets and scenarios and everything, is it really wrong of me to want to lighten the mood with a joke? Am I wrong in wanting to take a break? Is it a crime to have an imagination? According to my parents, no good can come from any career that I want to do, whehter it’s as a journalist, a professional pilot, a filmmaker, or really pretty much anything. Whatever I want to be, it isn’t what they want, but at the same time, they’ve never made it clear to me what I need to be.

For my entire life, my parents have tried to lecture me, to control me, to make me responsible and more adult. They’ve forbidden most movies over forty years old, refused to allow us to call the extremely limited selection of video games by that designation (we had to call them simulators), and ultimately clamped down on everything that made us children. I had a wild imagination, and they could never control that, but they did try. Once, they took every electronic I owned and force me to destroy them, calling my writing blasphemous and evil. They deleted almost all my high school work, ranging from essays to science lab reports. They stole my library card and destroyed it. They forbade me to read many books, even the non-fiction ones. They always claimed to be protecting me, which is probably why popular culture has infected me like smallpox. They isolated me from everything, and tried make me an adult at every chance they had. They took almost all enjoyment from our lives, and tried to force us to relive their childhoods.

Now, my childhood has come to an end.

I feel like I never had the chance to experience it.

So, Fringe came back last night, and I found myself really enjoying most of it. If you haven’t seen the episode, or watched Fringe at all, I’m going to need you to stop and watch all of Season 1 as well as Season 2’s premiere before continuing. Done? Good. Since you’re familiar with Fringe, you’ll know all about the characters, like Charlie and Olivia and especially Walter. As I’ve been listening to Fringe at work, I started thinking about the nature of the characters, specifically the new FBI lady who had joined, as well as contemplating the reasons for Charlie’s demise.

Here’s a problem that I have with most new dramatic characters on televison: they have to have SOMETHING in their past. John Shepard of Stargate: Atlantis had a bad military record for saving some guy’s ass. It was fairly well executed. On Castle, Kate Beckett’s mother was murdered and the mystery never solved, so she joined the police force. Every character on Lost has a haunted past, as does apparently every character on Stargate: Universe. Bad writers love giving everyone mysterious pasts, while good writers only focus on one or two.

Here’s a good example: the main character of the X-Files, Fox Mulder, lost his sister at a very young age. She was kidnapped by what he believed to be aliens. Later it turned out that she was kidnapped to be experimented on, but not necessarily by aliens. This defining moment is basically the thing that drives him in his search for the with-a-capital-T Truth. His counterpart, Dana Scully, was a doctor who was sent in essentially to debunk his theories. For six years, this really worked. Scully’s development came from her introduction to the X-Files, be it her battle with cancer, her pregnancy, or whatever. She was balanced out with Mulder until suddenly she’d had an affair with one of her med professors and blah blah blah. Then along comes John Doggett, and apparently his son was kidnapped (I’m in the middle of Season 8 right now), so he’s got some sort of past-thing too.

When did the X-Files go downhill? It was during Seasons 7 and 8. I would blame this partially on the fact that they concluded Mulder’s story and allowed him to find his sister, except that she was apparently some sort of Jedi ghost, so that was weird. When Mulder disappeared, suddenly Scully had to become the Mulder character, and Doggett had to become the skeptic. The only problem was that Scully didn’t really become a believer, and the relationship between the two characters of believer and skeptic broke down. By Season 8, you’ve got two skeptics, one of whom just happens to see a lot of weird things.

When the believer/skeptic dynamic broke down, the show broke down. They could have capitalized on Doggett’s newness to the X-Files, but instead he came across as a Scully who was a cop as opposed to a scientist. Often, the dialog would be brilliant, and Season 8’s “Monster of the Week” episodes, like RoadRunners, were completely awesome. But… there had been character relationship breakdown.  There was no real NEED for Doggett, as good of a character as he was. His past with his son really wasn’t that important, because it didn’t drive him to search for the paranormal. His reason for being a good cop could simply have come from his having been a marine; it didn’t need to be the overly dramatic death of his son.

In real life, people naturally group together, and often, a leader emerges, as do the idea men, the devil’s advocate, the peacemaker, and so forth. Groups that work well together are groups that complement each other. In a good story, you can’t afford have a cast of characters that works poorly together (unless your story’s actually ABOUT that). How many dozens of cliched teams of bizarre misfits (and always a badass lady) have you read? I’ve seen lots, myself, and they’re the most obvious examples of characters who work together. FOX’s Fringe is a great example of a show that had a team that worked well together without being completely obvious about the whole team.

Charlie was an important character because he was normal. He had a wife, he had a good history with the job, and was both a friend and a co-worker to Olivia. He could be trusted, and was very good at grounding the show. His death resulted in the loss of that grounding ability, and now we’ve got skepticop girl, who probably has a mysterious past, and basically seems to be another investigator on the team. Yay. She’s replaced Charlie as another Fringe Division investigator, but she hasn’t filled the mentor/big brother role that Charlie had. From what I’ve seen (which is only one episode, so I’m hoping that I’ll be writing a retraction here in a couple weeks), she’s a character that doesn’t have any real reason to be on the show, and she feels rather cliche. I would rather, if they felt they needed another female presence, have seen them give Astrid a larger role in the series, and have kept Charlie.

I don’t have a motto. There are ideals that I try to live by/naturally live by, though, and they can be summed up as the following:

1. Be Different. Neon Genesis Evangelion is a great example of what I mean. Never mind its weakenesses or strengths; it tells the mecha story in a way no one had ever done before. Most notably, the mechas aren’t even machines, they’re massive life forms encased in armor.  More important than the bizarre premise, however, was what Evangelion did. Instead of being an action story, like most mecha tales are, it was an extremely mature exploration of the human condition, of isolation and the need for relationships. For a genre that was for kids, and for a show that was originally broadcast in a children’s time slot, Evangelion is incredibly dense and mature. Whatever came before, I’m pretty sure no one had ever done anything like Evangelion had. It was different than everything that came before it, and this made allowed audiences to see something they’d never seen before.

2. Show Them Something They’ve Never Seen Before. A story about a soldier lost in a desert is one thing, but a story about a soldier in an alternate world where combat takes place in zeppelins high above a desert between two warring nations and the soldier’s crash is something altogether different. The imagery I have in my head is, I hope, wholly unique, just like the city that’s carved into the walls of a giant bottomless pit, or a six-eyed, six-armed spongy creature that sleeps at the bottom of a vast ocean of quicksand, upon which thousands of dunes are suspended like waves in a frozen ocean. China Mieville’s Iron Council is, I’m told, about a rogue train. People pick up the rails behind it and lay them down ahead, so that the train is always free, a symbol of freedom or something. That’s a new image. Never mind giant battles in space with space fighters and guns, or a couple of awkward, sexy people who find love; I want to show people things they haven’t even thought of yet.

3. Write Stories That Are Easy To Read and Fun To Dissect. A friend quoted me something from Orson Scott card the other day in response to something I’d said about making stories complex and frequently referential. The quote went along the lines of “people get too obsessed with that literary criticism and forget about their stories.” Having read Final Crisis, I’m inclined to agree. As a story, it doesn’t much make sense, but as a work of metatextual criticism, I suppose it’s brilliant. People should never feel lost or confused in a story (unless that story is Serial Experiments: Lain, which was intended to allow the audiences to draw their own conclusions and to be very dreamlike), and being a deconstructionist or referential is never worth sacrificing a good story over. Finnegan’s Wake is brilliant as a literary puzzle, but as a story, it’s very difficult to digest. If you want to tell a story, then for heaven’s sakes don’t do anything that would take away from it. That said, I really enjoy stories that I can look through and go “oh, he’s talking about X,” or “haha, she’s referencing Q!” In fact, I like going back through stories and seeing things I missed; it’s fun! I just don’t like stories that forget they’re stories and try to become some sort of bizarre criticism or whatever. Kill Bill is a really good example of a well-told story that also happens to be an exquisitely assembled pastiche.

Why am I awake at 5:28 on a Sunday morning?

I am in a church library.

It is 2:43 AM.

I have just finished talking to a friend about cities and stuff. Before that, I tried to digest another friend’s writing, but I found myself unable to comprehend. Two and a half hours ago, I’d just gotten home from work. Work. Fucking work. I hate it there, having to constantly sort peoples’ mail. I don’t care about the mail that gets sent to “FUCK YOU!” (yes, it happens), or the mail that gets sent to a guy whose last name is Porn (I am not kidding), or scientology mail or any of it. I don’t like the fact that I’ve got to sort your wedding invitations because you’re too stupid to use font that people can read. Fuck you and your cursive, you stupid dick, mail has to be printed! And what’s so hard about addresses?! You cannot send a letter to “John Smith/Colorado.” There are a billion John Smiths in Colorado! People don’t seem to understand that it’s “Name, Address, City/State/Zip” in that order and ONLY that order.  If you have an apartment, it’s best to put the apartment at the end of the address line, after the word “Apt.” It’s really fucking simple.

But you get morons who say they’re writing to Barack Obama and leave off the fucking address. They might not know it, but we’re not allowed to assume it’s the President. Hell, they might even have the name “Barack Obama, President of the United States” on the address, and we’re still not allowed to send it because there’s a rule that says “even if you know what it is, you have to type what’s written, and reject it if the pertinent information isn’t there!” At work, they’re bitching about efficiency, and, well, it goes like this…

1. You get hired.
2. You get trained on the letters system, then the magazines system. Then you are sent to key mail on your own.
3. You later get trained on a sort of all-purpose, modern system.
4. You get trained on packages.
5. You get trained on Change of Address forms.

So everyone on the floor can do letters and flats (magazines, newspapers) when they start. So someone got the bright idea to stick the all-purpose computers and the magazine computers in the same cubicles, and leave the letters systems either bonded with all-purpose or all by themselves. This means that me, who has all but the Change of Address forms training, has to sort magazines when the new guys could be sorting them. This means that less people are sorting the all-purpose stuff, which is where most of our volume comes from. This means that they’re keeping people at work longer than they have to (because if we could focus on the all-purpose stuff, we’d drop the volume down quicker), and ULTIMATELY, it means they’re spending more money to get the same amount of mail sorted.

…and the thing about the Post Office is, they spent more money than they made last year. If they’d do things like this, they’d save money. That said, I like the job. Hell, I’ve only had one better job, and the retail jobs can’t even come close. As it is, I get to put TV shows on my PSP and listen to them while I mindlessly sort mail. My major problem comes from the fact that the higher-ups seem upset about how efficient or fast we are, and how they want us to be the number 1 sorting facility in the nation, but then they decide to arrange the computers poorly, and then add screensavers that ask “are you being as efficient as possible?” to all of the monitors. I’m frustrated by the fact that they want our names when we make suggestions, because in spite of the “No FEAR” act that congress passed, most of us are temporary workers, and rocking the boat is a good way to make sure you don’t get rehired when your contract finishes.

So, basically, I like my job, but don’t like the decisions some of the higher-ups have made because they aren’t in the Post Office’s best interest.

The biggest problem that I have is that the job isn’t stimulating enough. As it is, all I do is read words, and type what I see. Occasionally, I’ll have to choose a name from a list of names, but that’s really as challenging as it gets. I find the job mentally sapping. I know students, waiters, and, hell, a soldier in Iraq, who all write for fun. They’re able to unwind after a good day’s work by writing something out. Me? I come home from work feeling like I’ve just had my intelligence dialed down to Eleven. From well over 100.

It’s 3:05 AM. I took a break… found out a friend is watching Fringe. I listened to it on my PSP at work tonight. It was pretty cool, but I hate the characterization. I really feel the guys at Bad Robot have great ideas, but don’t really understand how people work. It’s kind of disappointing. I want to write, but all I’ve really done is complain about my job. Let’s complain about something else… hurm… Oh, I know!  My parents are building an apartment for me!

(I’m going to complain about this.)

Church people are angry at me living in the church that they’re only in when I’m not around, and I keep the place really clean and tidy. They just don’t feel it’s right for God and me to be roomies, I guess. Thus, my parents are going to build an apartment on top of our one-story house, where the garage is. The problems are so many, I don’t know where to begin. They can’t afford it, for one thing, because their laser engraver business hasn’t taken off. Doing this will put them around $30,000 in debt, and my 53-year-old dad’s got heart problems that might make it difficult for him to build this thing before December, especially since he works full time running a multi-million-dollar lab. This is going to put a lot of stress on them. The apartment itself is awkwardly small, but somehow it manages to cram a bed, a couch, a small restroom, and a kitchen all in. Yes. There is a kitchen sink too.

Anyways, there are going to be two entryways. One is via an outside door. Cool! I might even get a doorbell, they say! The other, however, is via the living room, where the children play. Where. The. Children. Play. A new set of stairs will encourage them to play on it, next to the door that’s next to my bed, meaning that though I’ll want to sleep until 1 in the afternoon, when I need to get ready for work, I won’t get to, because they’ll be loud. My parents like to keep the thermostat up at 82 degrees most of the time, and I’m the kind of guy who prefers a cool 70. There won’t be a lock on the door, which means that my family can come in any time they’d like. If they do knock, it’ll be the kind of quick knock that says “hey, I’m coming in,” rather than “I’m here, please get the door!” My little siblings will do this all the time, because the apartment will be NEW, thus it will be interesting.

…and I will be trying to sleep. Of course, my parents hate the fact that I write and everything, and it’ll be harder to hide that fact when all they gotta do is walk up a flight of stairs, knock on the door, and burst in to tell me that I really should think about how eating prepared food isn’t healthy (despite the fact that’s usually all they ever buy) or how mercury is really unhealthy. Constant interruptions are going to be guaranteed. This will make it harder to relax, because my apartment won’t really even be mine. Any time grandparents come up for a visit, I’ll be booted out (likely back to the church library) where I can sleep until they’re gone. My stuff will be freely available to be messed with (last time I lived at home, my mom went through my room until she found my MP3 player, which she then took and demolished, along with my other electronics. Rock and Roll and Wolverine comics are bad, you see). Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they burst in on occasion to prod around my room, find a suspicious looking World War II biography under my bed, and declare that god lead them to find it and that it’s evil. Last time that happened, I wound up being pretty depressed and stopped checking out books from the library because they’d try to force me to get rid of all of them. I didn’t start reading regularly again for over a year.

So, basically, it’ll be hard to hide perfectly normal things from them, like the fact that I play Left 4 Dead or read Terry Pratchett or listen to Three Days Grace or write my own stories, and I’ll be interrupted all the time.

The worst thing, though?

They say that God told them to make this thing, and that it has nothing to do with the fact that the church people are mad and everything to do with the fact that they might need a place for people to stay when the Apocalypse comes. No joke.

It’s 3:27 AM now. I was really bored when I started this, because my brain’s barely operable and I’ve got nothing I feel like doing, but I can’t sleep. Except now, I think maybe I can. Goodnight, world. I hope you have a better life than I’ve got so far. For my part, I’m going to go look at S.T.A.L.K.E.R. cosplay.

(An article I wrote for the ICS, back in the day)

So, you’ve finally done it. After hours, days, or maybe even a couple weeks, you’ve managed to create the masterpiece that will supplant Dragon Ball as the world’s greatest manga! The premise is ingenious, you know. After all, your intelligent, manga-loving friends would tell you if something was wrong, right? Of course they would! They’re experts!

The main character, Sasuke Ryu (let’s face it, putting last names first is stupid), is a ninja with a dragon inside of him, trying to unlock its power so that he can do… well, you’ll think of something. His girlfriend, the attractive, shy, but somehow stubbornly controlling type has a strong interest in Sasuke that she tries to hide. Couple that with an enigmatic, silent stranger, and you’ll have written a manga so popular that God himself commits suicide because he knows he’ll never be as great as you. Of course, your art might not be the best, but that’s okay, because your friends (especially those great artists on DeviantArt) tell you that you’ve got the talent to succeed!

You know what might help you get past the final push and succeed? One tidbit of advice, that’s what! It’s very important that you pay attention to every word. Ready? Here it is:

No matter what you try, you can never be a dragon.

Think that doesn’t have anything to do with you being more awesome than God? It does, and I’ll get to that in a bit, but let me take a slightly different tone, for a moment. Some people, you included, have no business attempting to write a manga. I’m not talking about writing to get famous or plagiarizing from other works–both very common mistakes of new writers–I’m talking about not understanding who you’re writing to.

I’m talking about how your not-being-Japanese precludes you from writing a successful manga. “Wait,” you might say, “Americans have written successful manga! Just look at Usagi Yojimbo and Dirty Pair!” Aside from the fact that both series were created by Japanese people and that the former is actually considered an American comic book, neither of these books are particularly successful, especially in terms of name recognition. You see, even people who don’t know much about comics, Japanese or otherwise, are more likely to recognize Dragon Ball or Naruto than they are Dirty Pair. That’s the kind of success we’re talking about.

Of course, it’s far easier to define that kind of triumph as “something you’ll never have.”

You aren’t Japanese. If I was delivering this article at a Convention, there would be a shocked hush right about now. After all, if you dress like you’re Japanese, spout “genuine” phrases like “Watashi wa Desu,” eat pocky, and can understand Japanese (because the only real way to watch anime is unsubbed!), you pretty much are Japanese, right? I mean, aside from the physical features and where you were born, in your heart and soul, you know you understand so much about being Japanese that you actually are, right?

Wrong! You’re a moron.

See, this is where we get back to the dragon point: no amount of surgery or psychological adjustment will transform you into a dragon. You were born human, so even if you act like a dragon, you’re going to act like how you perceive a dragon would act, not how a dragon actually acts. Likewise, no matter how much you might know about being Japanese, the fact is that you aren’t. You’ve been raised elsewhere, most likely in the West, and now you’re hardwired to operate with a western mentality. I don’t care that you take your shoes off when you enter homes or that you don’t touch people because Japanese culture apparently doesn’t like touching or anything like that. No matter how much you want to be Japanese, you aren’t, and nothing you do can change that.

The highest-selling, most popular manga out there are always written by Japanese people, writing for a Japanese audience. The cultural divide that separates the Japanese from the non-Japanese is vast and uncrossable. In writing, there are three important rules that must be followed: be concise, be intelligible, and know your audience, and rule number three is the reason you’ll never write a succesful manga. Deep down inside, you don’t truly know your audience. Ultimately, any attempt to hybridize Western and Japanese culture is going to fail miserably, especially when compared to your goal of reaching those fourteen or fifteen million volumes of Dragon Ball.

So please, give up while you’re ahead. You’ll never write the next “Bleach.” Maybe I’m just a softie who hates seeing people fall flat on their faces, or maybe I just want to rid the world of socially awkward otakus with delusions of grandeur, I dunno. What I do know is that you’ll never get anywhere if you try to write a successful manga, because the only successes in the manga industry are one thing you aren’t: Japanese. No amount of motivation, talent, and skill is going to overcome that, although psychic powers that give you an innate understanding of culture might. You’re better off learning to write an American or European comic book, and even then, don’t try to be successful; try to be good.

I killed a spider today.

It was a big, wicked thing, unnatural and sinister in its movements. There is nothing that terrifies me; sure, some things make me queasy, and I can’t stand the sight or sound of vomiting, because then my obsessive-compulsiveness kicks in and I have to join the fun, but there is nothing on the face of God’s green Earth that terrifies me. Spiders, however, take me beyond terror. They awaken a primal, xenophobic instinct that screams “THIS SHOULD NOT BE!!!!” and forces me into fight or flight mode. My heart races, my pupils dilate, and when all is said and done, either the spider or myself is dead. Or, I’ve run away screaming like a pussy. So far, my track record is impressive, and I remain alive.

This spider was no different than any other spider I had seen, except for its size. Other than that, it was just as much a blight upon human existence as any other spider. It was huge; somewhere between the size of my palm and a CD (in other words, between 4 and 6 inches). I had just opened the door to the church–the big emergency exit at the back of the building–when this thing came skittering in, within inches of my bare feet, and into the darkened library where I usually sleep at nights. My first instinct was to run, but I knew that, eventually, I’d have to return to the room later.

To sleep.

Where the spider would get me.

So, with great reluctance, I scampered tip-toe over to the hallway light (and past the suddenly ominous library doorway), flicked on the light, and with great trepidation, stared into the darkness of the library. I was on tip-toe, with my legs spread far apart as to present two small targets rather than one big set of legs. I leaned forward, peering cautiously inward.  The hallway now a afforded me a slightly better look into the room. I poked my head in, checking first the light switch and then the ceiling. I didn’t reach my hand in because, had I done so, the spider (which might have been sitting on the light switch, waiting for the kill) could have been there and bitten me. I also checked the ceiling, to make sure it couldn’t ambush me from there.

Click!

Flourescent lights flickered on. The spider froze. Next to my shoe. My SHOE. For a moment, both of us stood at the ready, tensely staring at each other, I with my two natural god-given human eyes, and it with its demonic hundreds. Visions of my father telling stories of his childhood neighbor, a widow who had been murdered by a far lesser creature/abomination/spider than this laying in wait in her shoe. I moved. It tried to flee, but the panicked human moved far faster, haven been granted superhuman strength by his panic. I snatched at the shoe it had so treachorously tried to invade, and bashed it on the head, screaming “DIE, YOU FUZZY ABOMINATION!” in my mind. I lifted the shoe cautiously, and like some slasher-film monster, it rose from the carpet.  I hit it again. It wouldn’t die. It couldn’t die!

Then I panicked to a level I hadn’t panicked to before, and began smashing the thing repeatedly, raining a hell of size-thirteen death on the beast. It tried to flee, trailing yellow-red spider blood, but finally, I prevailed, and the spider was no more. Then, I picked it up in a dustpan, and threw it in the trash.

Long story short, my shoe is covered in this pus-like spider blood, and I’ll be inspecting them for the next few weeks to insure that no spiders have plotted revenge. I’ll likely be avoiding the emergency door for some time, if not permanently.

Fuck you Dad. If you’d never told us that story, I never would have been so afraid of spiders.

Because I feel like it, here’s a good webcomic that you should be reading. It’s brilliant, and the only instance that I find myself accepting photgraphs in comic form. Read it. Now.

One of my favorite strips.