Frig, am I even supposed to be using the Writing thread for that? I dunno, it has to go somewhere. I'm not stuffing it in the journal with the rest of the trash.
The Long Cat has been moved to the Meme Reservation.
@ Seamus: I still think of you whenever I think of Bane, which was a while back because he didn't have a Spanish accent and that is wrong.
You can just pick a point from the discussion and talk about it, and that'll start the discussion again. Discussion necromancy is allowed in this thread.
P Fist, you will want to know that when I mentioned Batman you popped into my head for a moment.
In my mind, you are Batman.
I'M A BAT
I'm glad that the association is just as strong as before. Spider-Man is my preferred character, but it's Batman who has the better stories, if that makes any sense.
@ Seamus: I still think of you whenever I think of Bane, which was a while back because he didn't have a Spanish accent and that is wrong.
You can just pick a point from the discussion and talk about it, and that'll start the discussion again. Discussion necromancy is allowed in this thread.
In that case, lemme crack down on the subject of POC superheroes.
Bane's casting didn't bother me that much; he's always been drawn with very light skin, and this guy (not Robin) is his father:
No word on his mother. Ras al Ghul becoming white bothered me far more than Bane being cast the same. Were I the casting director, I would've gone for Javier Bardem.
It's a darn shame that WB seems so obsessed with retelling Batman's origins over and over, because the Bat family has some great characters that are being ignored. Namely, Cassandra Cain:
And Onyx:
The former was the second Batgirl, while the latter was the only vigilante that Batman allowed to operate in Gotham outside of his own network. They have some shared backstory in that they were both raised as killers and have ties to Lady Shiva. Both are very interesting, criminally underused characters.
On Marvel's side, they have the Falcon set to appear in the next Captain America movie. He was one of the most progressive superheroes of his time, being a black character who didn't shoot lightning or have 'black' in his name. He's Cap's partner, not his sidekick, and has always been portrayed as on par with Cap. I can't remember the actor's name off the top of my head, but I'm excited to see him onscreen.
If DC/WB ever decides to bring the Green Lantern back to the big screen (likely with the upcoming Justice League movie), I say they should make him John Stewart, not Hal Jordan.
Stewart remains the only Lantern I actually like. Since he seems like a real person who is also a superhero instead of just Le Generic Archetype.
i had a period when i was like 12 where i was obsessed with superheroes for a few months and read ridiculous amounts of things about them without reading any comics at all and then i stopped.
this happens to me a lot.
I like the idea of superhero comics but many of them are just so fucking awfully written. The only superhero comics I've ever read and enjoyed were Grant Morisson's run on Doom Patrol and the related Flex Mentallo. These are both questionably superhero comics.
See, that's another problem. A lot of the well-known black actors are getting old and we're not getting a lot of replacements.
Idris Elba's the youngest up-and-coming black actor that I can think of, and he just hit 40 (oh, wait, there's that Michael B. Jordan fellow). John Stewart's perpetually 32, just like every superhero without an unspecified age.
Also, I don't like the image Wikipedia has for John Stewart
He has that Black Adam Widow's Peak going on, and his face looks off. He doesn't look black; he looks like a tan Namor. It's like they chose the least black-looking picture to put up there.
And what's up with that kid's arm
I have no idea if it was intentional but I wouldn't be shocked if that's exactly what they did (Wikipedia has a strong subcommunity that is very conservative. See also: the "female authors" category debacle). Also this picture is just bad in general imo.
We've only had three black heroes in superhero movies since 2004's Catwoman: Heimdall (Idris Elba), Nick Fury, Iron Patriot and Django.
Well, you can technically count Hancock, but Hancock's barely a superhero movie. Two of them are so essential to their respective canons that not casting them as black (or removing them from the movies entirely) would result in massive backlash (and, in Nick Fury's case, a lawsuit). Idris Elba as Heimdall is the only case where minority representation has actually increased, and there was a noticeable backlash to that decision.
In contrast, the Mandarin got turned white, Catwoman was turned back to white after a long history of her being black in popular media before Halle wrecked it (see Eartha Kitt), the Al Ghul's are now white, Bane is British instead of Hispanic (though I quite liked Hardy's performance). And there's the business with other movies that play to the same crowds as superhero movies. The people behind the Hunger Games specifically requested blond, white girls to play Katniss. That one girl in the Harry Potter films got turned from black to white when she become relevant to the plot. And then there's the landmine that is Benedict Cumberpatch playing Khan.
isn't Ra's al-Ghul Egyptian? (his horribly rendered name aside).
I never notice these things because I don't watch superhero movies. I only saw The Avengers because my friends wanted to see it.
I'm not really drawing conclusions from this, but these are things that have been happening, and I'm kind of shrugging while implicitly gesturing towards said things.
Hollywood whitewashing is not exactly a new thing, but it's 2013. You'd think we'd have moved on a little bit by now.
On Marvel's side, they have the Falcon set to appear in the next Captain America movie. He was one of the most progressive superheroes of his time, being a black character who didn't shoot lightning or have 'black' in his name. He's Cap's partner, not his sidekick, and has always been portrayed as on par with Cap. I can't remember the actor's name off the top of my head, but I'm excited to see him onscreen.
Didn't they retool his backstory to make him a former pimp or was that a long time ago.
@ Seamus: Onyx. Forgot about her. Knew about Cassandra Cain, of course. Except for the bit where she went Dragon Lady and learned Cherokee, she's pretty cool.
I guess I should have mentioned Falcon. It's kind of a 'believe it when I see it' sort of thing. But yeah, Falcon joining Bucky should be a ton of fun.
I kind of wish that Goliath was in the Avengers movie. But I guess they didn't want any size-changers in the movie. Would explain why Hawkeye and Black Widow are in and Pym and Wasp aren't.
Comics never did explain why black people are natural conduits of lightning. I mean, can I learn this? It'd save me the trouble of carrying around the laptop powercord.
Schrodinger's cat is a simple macroscopic example used to try to explain measurement principle to a group of people who did not understand Quantum Mechanics and it blew up from there. Schrodinger himself hated the story/example.
Explaining superposition is difficult, and most people just take it for what it is and run with it. I like to think of it as a quantum analog to action minimization. The idea that given two points in space and time, the path taken between those two points is the path which minimizes the action given all constraints of the system. The Quantum analog being the trajectory of the system is a sum over all possible paths (could be finite or infinite), although not each path has to be equally likely. Therefore, we consider a particle(cat, w/e) to be in a superposition of all possible states with associated probabilities of being in those states.
Another way I like to look at superposition is in terms of multiple universes(Less accepted, but I think its cool). Given a system with two possible states A and B, for example, each equally likely. When the observer O measures the system, he will either find A or B and the system collapses into that state (Classical Measurement Theory). However, there is a step in between the measurement and collapse where the observer becomes entangled with both states, producing two separate systems. One in which the Observer finds A and one in which he finds B, thus multiple universes in which all possible outcomes exist. (Cat alive and cat dead)
Most people do not like these ideas because it defies our everyday experiences, but the computer you are currently using to write on these forums is made from technology characterized by these principles.
I've never thought about that before but aren't there like five black superheroes who have "can use lightning" as a power?
That's really fuckin weird. I guess that they're supposed to be homages to the original Black Lightning but Static is the only one that actually stands out in my mind as a separate entity.
I never notice these things because I don't watch superhero movies. I only saw The Avengers because my friends wanted to see it.
Funny thing is, I've only watched The Dark Knight, half of Avengers, Captain America and Iron Man.
If you hang around the right parts of tumblr long enough, you don't have to see the movies to know exactly how they go. Except for Thor. All they show is the part where he breaks that coffee mug and smiles at that one girl.
And Ra's al Ghul is...Middle Eastern. Wikipedia says that he's currently Arabian. So, probably not Liam Neeson.
"Generically Middle Eastern" irritates me. Is he from one of the Arab countries? Egypt? Iran? Israel? Make up your fuckin mind DC.
(Generally I don't like it when several different ethnicities are treated as being the same. There's a pretty wide gulf between someone who's Bedouin and someone who's Iranian and someone who's Turkish)
@ Seamus: Onyx. Forgot about her. Knew about Cassandra Cain, of course. Except for the bit where she went Dragon Lady and learned Cherokee, she's pretty cool.
I guess I should have mentioned Falcon. It's kind of a 'believe it when I see it' sort of thing. But yeah, Falcon joining Bucky should be a ton of fun.
I kind of wish that Goliath was in the Avengers movie. But I guess they didn't want any size-changers in the movie. Would explain why Hawkeye and Black Widow are in and Pym and Wasp aren't.
Comics never did explain why black people are natural conduits of lightning. I mean, can I learn this? It'd save me the trouble of carrying around the laptop powercord.
I think the last time Onyx appeared was in Under the Hood, and that was 2005. Some of her appearances are marred by War Games, that terrible crossover that killed Stephanie Brown. I can guarantee that she'll never ever appear in the New 52.
If Goliath shows up, it'll be long, long after Ant Man and probably only as a cameo. The only experience I have with him is his appearance in Civil War, another thing that we don't talk about.
Comics have taught me that the only power I've ever really wanted with all my heart are forbidden to me because of the fact that I lack pigmentation.
well you see some days he's from Saudi Arabia (or the UAE, but who ever heard of there being more than one Arab country?), but every third Wednesday he's from Turkey instead. On the second Friday of the month he's actually Andalusian, and once in a blue moon he turns Greek instead.
"Generically Middle Eastern" irritates me. Is he from one of the Arab countries? Egypt? Iran? Israel? Make up your fuckin mind DC.
(Generally I don't like it when several different ethnicities are treated as being the same. There's a pretty wide gulf between someone who's Bedouin and someone who's Iranian and someone who's Turkish)
Ras al Ghul's origin has him at over 600 years old, and I think that they always wanted to keep his exact ethnicity vague because of that. Something about being mysterious and having untraceable origins.
Ras al Ghul's origin has him at over 600 years old, and I think that they always wanted to keep his exact ethnicity vague because of that. Something about being mysterious and having untraceable origins.
I actually didn't know this and if anything that's just more confusing.
I'm sure at some point that they've had him as secretly having been [random historical public domain character of Arab ethnicity regardless of his connection to Ra's al-Ghul's motives or the character in general] though, am I right?
Wikipedia says that he's Arabian. Like, ancient nomad Arabian.
I can't say what he was, or if canon on his origin was retconned, because I don't follow Ra's Al Ghul. Never struck me as a proper part of Batman lore.
(Naturally, my feelings on Damian Wayne's existence are...mixed).
I think the go-to argument when someone suggests “white entertainment television" or “heterosexuality awareness month"- that “every channel is white entertainment television," and the like- is somewhat flawed. Not outright wrong, but I feel like there’s a better argument that’s being ignored. Persons of color, LGBT people, etc. are all very comprised of varied people with drastically different cultural backgrounds. However, they all, in living in the United States, have a shared background in that their group was oppressed for a long time. White or heterosexual people, however varied they might be, do not have any unifying experiences, so “white pride" or “heterosexual pride" pretty much mean nothing.
There ya go.
I didn't get to say this earlier, but thank you. More than before, you really have my respect.
I think the go-to argument when someone suggests “white entertainment television" or “heterosexuality awareness month"- that “every channel is white entertainment television," and the like- is somewhat flawed. Not outright wrong, but I feel like there’s a better argument that’s being ignored. Persons of color, LGBT people, etc. are all very comprised of varied people with drastically different cultural backgrounds. However, they all, in living in the United States, have a shared background in that their group was oppressed for a long time. White or heterosexual people, however varied they might be, do not have any unifying experiences, so “white pride" or “heterosexual pride" pretty much mean nothing.
There ya go.
I didn't get to say this earlier, but thank you. More than before, you really have my respect.
I like this with the caveat that it should be "white americans" rather than just white people in general.
The Irish for example, have tons of shared experiences. Likewise the Dutch, French, Germans, or whoever else you really care to name.
Comments
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Fun fact: PBS aired the first reality show, back in the 1970s
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
The Long Cat has been moved to the Meme Reservation.
In my mind, you are Batman.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
You can just pick a point from the discussion and talk about it, and that'll start the discussion again. Discussion necromancy is allowed in this thread.
I'M A BAT
I'm glad that the association is just as strong as before. Spider-Man is my preferred character, but it's Batman who has the better stories, if that makes any sense.
what superhero discussion was there
I've made superheroes you know
Super Butterfly Princess Miko
fighting evil and the hearts of bad guys
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Bane's casting didn't bother me that much; he's always been drawn with very light skin, and this guy (not Robin) is his father:
No word on his mother. Ras al Ghul becoming white bothered me far more than Bane being cast the same. Were I the casting director, I would've gone for Javier Bardem.
It's a darn shame that WB seems so obsessed with retelling Batman's origins over and over, because the Bat family has some great characters that are being ignored. Namely, Cassandra Cain:
And Onyx:
The former was the second Batgirl, while the latter was the only vigilante that Batman allowed to operate in Gotham outside of his own network. They have some shared backstory in that they were both raised as killers and have ties to Lady Shiva. Both are very interesting, criminally underused characters.
On Marvel's side, they have the Falcon set to appear in the next Captain America movie. He was one of the most progressive superheroes of his time, being a black character who didn't shoot lightning or have 'black' in his name. He's Cap's partner, not his sidekick, and has always been portrayed as on par with Cap. I can't remember the actor's name off the top of my head, but I'm excited to see him onscreen.
this happens to me a lot.
I like the idea of superhero comics but many of them are just so fucking awfully written. The only superhero comics I've ever read and enjoyed were Grant Morisson's run on Doom Patrol and the related Flex Mentallo. These are both questionably superhero comics.
I have no idea if it was intentional but I wouldn't be shocked if that's exactly what they did (Wikipedia has a strong subcommunity that is very conservative. See also: the "female authors" category debacle). Also this picture is just bad in general imo.isn't Ra's al-Ghul Egyptian? (his horribly rendered name aside).
I never notice these things because I don't watch superhero movies. I only saw The Avengers because my friends wanted to see it.
Hollywood whitewashing is not exactly a new thing, but it's 2013. You'd think we'd have moved on a little bit by now.Didn't they retool his backstory to make him a former pimp or was that a long time ago.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
I guess I should have mentioned Falcon. It's kind of a 'believe it when I see it' sort of thing. But yeah, Falcon joining Bucky should be a ton of fun.
I kind of wish that Goliath was in the Avengers movie. But I guess they didn't want any size-changers in the movie. Would explain why Hawkeye and Black Widow are in and Pym and Wasp aren't.
Comics never did explain why black people are natural conduits of lightning. I mean, can I learn this? It'd save me the trouble of carrying around the laptop powercord.
Explaining superposition is difficult, and most people just take it for what it is and run with it. I like to think of it as a quantum analog to action minimization. The idea that given two points in space and time, the path taken between those two points is the path which minimizes the action given all constraints of the system. The Quantum analog being the trajectory of the system is a sum over all possible paths (could be finite or infinite), although not each path has to be equally likely. Therefore, we consider a particle(cat, w/e) to be in a superposition of all possible states with associated probabilities of being in those states.
Another way I like to look at superposition is in terms of multiple universes(Less accepted, but I think its cool). Given a system with two possible states A and B, for example, each equally likely. When the observer O measures the system, he will either find A or B and the system collapses into that state (Classical Measurement Theory). However, there is a step in between the measurement and collapse where the observer becomes entangled with both states, producing two separate systems. One in which the Observer finds A and one in which he finds B, thus multiple universes in which all possible outcomes exist. (Cat alive and cat dead)
Most people do not like these ideas because it defies our everyday experiences, but the computer you are currently using to write on these forums is made from technology characterized by these principles.
I've never thought about that before but aren't there like five black superheroes who have "can use lightning" as a power?
That's really fuckin weird. I guess that they're supposed to be homages to the original Black Lightning but Static is the only one that actually stands out in my mind as a separate entity.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
If you hang around the right parts of tumblr long enough, you don't have to see the movies to know exactly how they go. Except for Thor. All they show is the part where he breaks that coffee mug and smiles at that one girl.
And Ra's al Ghul is...Middle Eastern. Wikipedia says that he's currently Arabian. So, probably not Liam Neeson.
"Generically Middle Eastern" irritates me. Is he from one of the Arab countries? Egypt? Iran? Israel? Make up your fuckin mind DC.
(Generally I don't like it when several different ethnicities are treated as being the same. There's a pretty wide gulf between someone who's Bedouin and someone who's Iranian and someone who's Turkish)
If Goliath shows up, it'll be long, long after Ant Man and probably only as a cameo. The only experience I have with him is his appearance in Civil War, another thing that we don't talk about.
Comics have taught me that the only power I've ever really wanted with all my heart are forbidden to me because of the fact that I lack pigmentation.
does he change every so often or what
well you see some days he's from Saudi Arabia (or the UAE, but who ever heard of there being more than one Arab country?), but every third Wednesday he's from Turkey instead. On the second Friday of the month he's actually Andalusian, and once in a blue moon he turns Greek instead.
I'm sure at some point that they've had him as secretly having been [random historical public domain character of Arab ethnicity regardless of his connection to Ra's al-Ghul's motives or the character in general] though, am I right?
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
I can't say what he was, or if canon on his origin was retconned, because I don't follow Ra's Al Ghul. Never struck me as a proper part of Batman lore.
(Naturally, my feelings on Damian Wayne's existence are...mixed).
I like this with the caveat that it should be "white americans" rather than just white people in general.
The Irish for example, have tons of shared experiences. Likewise the Dutch, French, Germans, or whoever else you really care to name.