2015-06-25: Smack Talk

[Nosy Neighbordroid]

Discussion thread for Smack Talk

[Starphoenix]

Please Jordan, do what your heart tells you to do... I don't think anyone would judge you.

...

Anyone worth the effort judging you...

[Alice Machaer]

I wonder whether this will end with Jordan losing it and revealing her gender just to shut Princess Badass up.

[Sabrina Pandora]

I could really get used to the ongoing superheroic action. It's better than anything DC is shoveling out lately.

[lyze]

This is kind of an issue with comics now isn't it? We're all for equality of gender in everything for the most part, but if a male character is beating on a female characters, there's PC fallout all over the place no matter how actually equal it is for those characters to see beyond the gender of their opponent and deliver the beatdown that's dramatically appropriate. It's like that cover of joker gloating over batgirl, everyone got up in arms about the rapiness of it all. He's joker, he's a psycho, I'm pretty sure he'd do that to anyone he could and it's not a sex thing.

[Alice Machaer]

I can't, of course, speak for everyone who had a problem with that Batgirl-and-Joker cover, but their reasons for doing so varied, and can't all be reduced to "Eek, rapey." In my case, it was the context of the other variant covers for Joker Month. Note that the Batgirl variant is the only one which shows a superhero totally helpless and in tears while facing the Joker. All the other heroes look annoyed at worst. That also applies to the Catwoman and Wonder Woman covers, so no, I don't think it's a case of misogyny or rape culture. My problem is that many at DC still seem to automatically think of Barbara Gordon as "the character the Joker crippled and took naked photos of in The Killing Joke," when she's been so much more than that, whether as Batgirl or Oracle. And I think that shows a complete lack of imagination, creativity and ability to move on.

[dark_lord_zagato]

That's the thing about villains. Once in a while they need to do something that's just not fucking cool. That's what makes them villains. That's the reason why they can't just shake hands and make up with the hero. The Joker is just doing what he does best on that cover, playing mind games with people. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Kian]

Why wouldn't Jordan just... walk away? That would be a greater humiliation of PB than kicking her ass (more than she's done already). I mean, the usual way these things go is the villain is doing something, then the hero interrupts them. Which means Jordan should have been in the middle of some dastardly plan. Since PB is clearly not a danger, she could afford to just go back to it and complete it.

[Baeraad]

See, this is why living down to idiots' expectations of you never turns out to be as satisfying as you think. Because the thing with giving them what they expect is that, well, they expect it. Which means that they're prepared for it - maybe even kind of want it, since it reaffirms their image of themselves as virtuous victims. Taking the high road is thankless, but all things considered, it's usually the least bad option in a no-win situation.

... actually, it occurs to me that that is a lesson that Jordan could stand to apply to her life as a whole.

[Michael Poe]

Unfortunately, some characters are just going to be tied to certain stories or plot elements for good or ill no matter how far they might progress from them, Iron Man is forever attached to Demon in a Bottle and Civil War, Ant Man is forever bound to that time he had a psychological episode and hit his wife, Wonder Woman is going to have that stupid fucking invisible jet dragging behind her till the end of time and inexperienced teen characters will likely stay inexperienced and teenage (or at least 'early 20s') until the heat death of the universe. Also DC seems to have a thing now about seriously down playing the positive parts of the Oracle period so it's not quite so obvious that she's doing far less good running around in a cape than she was coordinating and feeding information to dozens of other heroes. So they actually have a very tiny amount of past material about the character to work with now.
But anyway, I do think that the cover was a absolutely terrible thematic choice for the current lighthearted Batgirl run, and it probably should have been put on another Bat book instead, or at least saved for an issue that actually involved the Joker or dealing with her PTSD from the incident rather than wasting such an emotion provoking image on a stupid variant cover gimmick. And I actually was a bit disappointed that they didn't do something Death in The Family related for the Red Hood variant cover. Granted, I'm not even sure that book is still around to get a cover in the first place.

Now On the other hand, the reaction to the Batgirl cover and similar comic industry snafus just illustrates how over-sensitive things have gotten and how comics seem to be entering a period where social progressiveness has somehow managed to go all the way around to become more than a little authoritarian in nature, and is enacting a new bizarro version of Seduction of the Innocent on the industry.
I mean, back in 2006 or so, DC had the character Spoiler get murdered in a particularly gory fashion. And as you'd expect, there was a lot of complaining coming from places like scans daily, and various other blogs. However, the outrage really wasn't (mostly) about how her death or the torture scene was unfair or sexist, because most everyone seemed to agree that there really wasn't much difference between Jason Todd's death scene and Spoiler's. Both in terms of the actual content and in DC just callously killing off an established character to give a storyline cheap emotional gravitas. Instead, the majority of the complaints were that DC should give Spoiler a memorial in the Batcave similar to Jason's, and that by not giving her one, DC was stating that the character's brief term as Robin somehow didn't count, possibly because she was a girl.*
But if that situation happened today, I don't think for a second that the tumblr and twitter crowd would behave so rationally... instead, I'd expect that they'd be screaming "misogyny!" at DC just for daring to show a female character be brutally tortured like that, possibly even going so far as to demand that the writer, artist, or editor involved with the story be fired.

* I don't think DC ever actually gave her a glass tube, instead they brought the character back to life and made her Batgirl for awhile. Which kind of sends an odd message, given the context, and DC probably should have gotten more a lot more shit for that decision.