I have stayed quiet on this for about as long as I can, as it still pops up in my newsfeed everyday.
What that is, is DC and the Batgirl cover. I am not going to go over the particulars here, as you are either already in the know or can functionally use Google. What I want to discuss, or really vent about, if the absolute nonsense that this "controversy" is.
I respect that the artist has requested the cover pulled and I respect that DC has honoured that request, but what I don't respect are the people who were offended by the cover and demanded it be removed. How dare you? Art does not exist to coddle your sensibilities. You are no better than Helen Lovejoy and the SNUH wanting to cover David's wee-wee with a leaf.
If we continue to allow this behaviour to exist and reward it by giving into its demands, art, storytelling, and creativity will suffer and in turn we will be weakened for the suffering. As each trigger warning goes up slowly we will have nothing but art of kittens, or sunflowers. Stories about people making soup and helping old ladies across the street (only after the old lady, who is fully independent and capable requests the help that is. Oh and maybe I shouldn't say "old lady" but "person of better age", sorry didn't mean to trigger anyone).
My point is this, stop it. While I didn't like the cover myself, and haven't enjoyed post-Oracle Batgirl at all, I didn't see just cause for all this outrage. The Joker has been, since at least the Bronze Age, the most vile and repulsive villain in the DC Universe, in fact I would be hard pressed to name a character from any other company that could compare the iconic evil that he represents. Evil characters do evil things, this makes us want to see them get served a big heaping pile of justice that much more!
You know who got that? 1980's WWF and Shakespeare. My sister once asked me why I liked wrestling so much and I said "It's thyroid theatre. It is the ONLY place on TV where the good-guys are good and the bad-guys are bad and eventually the good-guys always win." The 90's changed that to be sure and I didn't tell her my favs were "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, "The Nature Boy" Ric Flair and Jake "The Snake" Roberts, but the point was there.
Would we hate Macbeth as much if his men didn't kill Mcduff's child? No, we wouldn't. Hell would Hannibal Lecter fascinate us as much if he didn't eat people? The answer to this and a million other characters or plot points that echo through the history of storytelling, art, musics, etc... is NO.
Hell if Seven were released today, it wouldn't be his wife's head in the box, but her cardigan and then Brad Pitt would rush to rescue her and find that she had already rescued herself, as she was no "damsel in distress".
When we remove the power for art to make us feel, even dark things and sad things, we remove the humanity of art and replace it with an Orwellian/Eisenhower's American insincerity that not only makes the art valueless but cheapens the media upon which it was created to the point of disgrace.
Please stop it.
What that is, is DC and the Batgirl cover. I am not going to go over the particulars here, as you are either already in the know or can functionally use Google. What I want to discuss, or really vent about, if the absolute nonsense that this "controversy" is.
I respect that the artist has requested the cover pulled and I respect that DC has honoured that request, but what I don't respect are the people who were offended by the cover and demanded it be removed. How dare you? Art does not exist to coddle your sensibilities. You are no better than Helen Lovejoy and the SNUH wanting to cover David's wee-wee with a leaf.
If we continue to allow this behaviour to exist and reward it by giving into its demands, art, storytelling, and creativity will suffer and in turn we will be weakened for the suffering. As each trigger warning goes up slowly we will have nothing but art of kittens, or sunflowers. Stories about people making soup and helping old ladies across the street (only after the old lady, who is fully independent and capable requests the help that is. Oh and maybe I shouldn't say "old lady" but "person of better age", sorry didn't mean to trigger anyone).
My point is this, stop it. While I didn't like the cover myself, and haven't enjoyed post-Oracle Batgirl at all, I didn't see just cause for all this outrage. The Joker has been, since at least the Bronze Age, the most vile and repulsive villain in the DC Universe, in fact I would be hard pressed to name a character from any other company that could compare the iconic evil that he represents. Evil characters do evil things, this makes us want to see them get served a big heaping pile of justice that much more!
You know who got that? 1980's WWF and Shakespeare. My sister once asked me why I liked wrestling so much and I said "It's thyroid theatre. It is the ONLY place on TV where the good-guys are good and the bad-guys are bad and eventually the good-guys always win." The 90's changed that to be sure and I didn't tell her my favs were "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, "The Nature Boy" Ric Flair and Jake "The Snake" Roberts, but the point was there.
Would we hate Macbeth as much if his men didn't kill Mcduff's child? No, we wouldn't. Hell would Hannibal Lecter fascinate us as much if he didn't eat people? The answer to this and a million other characters or plot points that echo through the history of storytelling, art, musics, etc... is NO.
Hell if Seven were released today, it wouldn't be his wife's head in the box, but her cardigan and then Brad Pitt would rush to rescue her and find that she had already rescued herself, as she was no "damsel in distress".
When we remove the power for art to make us feel, even dark things and sad things, we remove the humanity of art and replace it with an Orwellian/Eisenhower's American insincerity that not only makes the art valueless but cheapens the media upon which it was created to the point of disgrace.
Please stop it.
