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Steven Universe VS Omniman
🕑 Added 2021-05-15 17:13:34 +0000 UTCHey guys if you want to participate to the conversation on more public platforms, here are the links to Tumblr and Furaffinity
How to make an immortal superpowerful alien reckon the fallacy of his "oh, they will die anyway" logic? By having common sense slammed into his head by another immortal superpowerful alien.
Oh, Steven Universe, you screwed it badly with Future, but I still love you.
Now it follows an expanded version of my previous hot take on Invincible, that I accompany with a safer image so even people not searching for adult content can find it and participate. Some points are repeated, but rephrased in a way that I hope you find entertaining.
Obviously, this time will have a bunch of spoilers. The meme "Think Mark Think!" itself is a pretty big spoiler, anyway.
Superhero cartoon with gore
Invincible has been a very frustrating experience for me. Because it has quite a bunch of perks: it starts a brand new universe, with characters that aren't burdened by decades of tangled continuity, a 40 minutes length for every episode that should be employed much more in animated series, a likable protagonist that stays true to his values, very good animation, and very sexy character designs for the mature men.
But you have to endure a pretty relevant thing: lots and lots of gore.
So much that the public reception of Invincible can be summarized in four words: superhero cartoon with gore.
And it's pretty fitting because the story isn't much more: you could easily rewrite it in a PG cartoon, making all the deaths of named characters non-gory, never focusing on the deaths of extras, removing all the raunchy moments and swearwords, implying that some bones have been broken in the big fights, and you will obtain a pretty standard Silver Age comic book story.
Except with two events:
- The cloning subplot, that doesn't impact the main story right now and doesn't say much more than the 1998 Pokémon Movie (original dialogues) already did.
- The underground train scene, but I will come back later to that because that scene is bullshit.)
Something that cannot be said for another gory cartoon that has dropped its fourth season recently: Castlevania. Even if you removed all the gore, dreadful creature designs, swearwords, and stick to the atmosphere of the original games, it would be still a story about hell breaking loose into the world, free will, the nature of humanity, and abuse of the authorities on the weaker. And very character-relevant threesomes BTW.
It would be a weirdly clean PG13 cartoon, but still, PG13.
There's nothing wrong with that, with liking a story that could have been written 50 years ago, (there's a mad scientist that builds cyborgs in his basement, for god's sake!) except for the gore and dirty jokes, just don't say that is deconstructive.
Omniman is bad for humanity not because the existence of superheroes itself questions the worth of humanity and the point of religion or democracy, but because he's an evil colonialist with superpowers.
Like dozens of survived Kryptonians before him.
Easy come easy gore
But I might understand why people believe it's deconstructive. If confronted with the super safe standard imposed by Disney on the MCU, yeah, night and day.
But also, Invincible actively deceives the viewer into believing it's in opposition to the mainstream comics: by putting into its cast a bunch of knock-offs of the Justice League and massacring them in the first episode.
It's truly a "That's not your grandma Superhero Cartoon" moment. Pure face value that doesn't build to any questioning about the role of superheroes in society (Omniman is evil, period) and hinges on the knock-offs suddenly reasoning like they were videogame mobs with no defense tactics and like their bodies swing from normal resistance to the solidity of Play-Doh.
And that's my biggest qualm about the gore: it's gratuitous, in the sense that there's no consistency about the… consistency of bodies.
With no logic whatsoever an encounter could be a safe PG exchange of punches, the same punch smashing the skull of the receiver, or give an exposed fracture to the arm of the attacker.
The famous train scene requires Mark's body to be so damn resistant to cut open through meters and meters of steel and just break his goggles in the process. Nolan's punches should open craters in the bedrock in order to hurt his son as he did in the last episode.
And yeah, somebody could say that anime does it all the time, and I agree, I don't defend anime and I think that Japanese entertainment industries should grow the fuck up and stop being so coiled around the Otaku fanbase, but there's a difference with the swings of power in shonen battles.
The concept of ki (reiatsu, chakra whatever) that almost always is employed and correlates the combatants' strength and resistance to their determination, and the formulaic use of some visual signifiers to communicate the change: the color of the hair or eyes, light effects, totem spirits appearing, complete transformations in different creatures, you name it.
Instead in Invincible, here there's no hint on what we're going to see: if an opponent just knocked down or his flesh ripped away from the bones, and it feels very bent to the writer's whims.
Speaking of gratuitous, the abuse of the healing factor, a criticism I have against the entire "genre" of fantastical action stories. Just stop.
It's action without consequences, have the cake and eat it too, the catharsis and the pretense of maturity through violence against a named character without the implication of having him out of commission for a long time or for the rest of the story.
It makes violence less and less impactful, and the writer has to constantly escalate to the point of ridiculousness, it makes both the protagonists and the villains look so bad at their jobs that you wonder why you should be invested in any of them.
It's so widespread that new writers and artist consider normal to present a character without a pre-established healing factor having their side or shoulder pierced and just do fine and be back in shape the day after. It doesn't work that way. We're not vampires.
It will always be better to have moderate violence that leaves a persistent effect that the characters have to cope with, see Zuko's non-sexy scar, than larger-than-life violence that gets magicked away the following episode.
It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Super Hitler!
Going back again to the metro scene and the roles of meat sacks that humans have in this story, there's another thing that rubs me in the wrong way when it comes to superhero stories.
Worldbuilding in these stories is a giant mess. Not just superheroes are real, but aliens, FTL travel, ghost, Heaven, Hell are, all at the same time. And biology and physics are so funky that a goddamn mad scientist can build cyborgs in his basement, no financial backing needed.
Invincible, being a conservative story plays into this trope, and doesn't care that with such a setup we should live in Star Trek society and civilian technology should be damn better at handling supervillain attacks.
It's so bizarre that some of our modern appliances (smartphones, vocal assistants, 3D printers) have been inspired by the fantasy of sci-fi writers, but didn't become a part of civilian technology until it happened in real life.
Because, if there's a thing that humans are proven to be consistently good at, that's exploiting every resource and technology to their favor. They can't just be surrounded by basically magitech and not having already harnessed it.
Tell that to Omniman when he blathers about the worthlessness of humans.
That train should have been made in the same material of Battle Beast's mace and put an end to the Graysons' miserable lives.
A slippery slope
I've found a sort of trend with adventure stories that hinge a lot on shock value.
Firstly they end up justifying rape and racism scenes because they look coherent with the violence, except that art doesn't live in a vacuum, and rape and racism are relatable stuff that scares a lot of people constantly while being dismembered by Super Hitler it's not.
Secondly, the writers end up considering it as a good payoff every time and use it to cover various writing sins, like introducing characters and subplots that don't go anywhere and slow down the plot people care about.
Or, in the case of comedy, thinking that a joke is funny just because it's raunchy and mean.
See what happened to Game of Thrones. People say that the last three seasons were bad because the main characters acquired plot armor, but the truth is that the writing was bad and they tried to cover it with gore.
Shock value is the dressing, maybe the appetizer, but it cannot be the main course.
Why so sexy?
In the end, my biggest source of frustration about Invincible is having such a bunch of very sexy mature male characters, a demographic that historically has been depicted as repulsive, and see them employed as helpless victims or Super Hitler.
All of them are way more handsome in their cartoon than comics form, especially Omniman, which has now a proportioned forehead, a great voice actor, and a variety of facial expressions in the last two episodes superior to every other character in the entire series. There has been love, and thirst put in animating Super Hitler and I can't get over it.
Fandoms are pretty much known to pick villains, decontextualize and transform them into sex symbols of eversive and flamboyant male beauty. See Joker, he's just the worst, as a person, as a partner for Harley Queen, as a dangerous ableist stereotype, but he's the template for the Tumblr Sexy Men.
And I feel like there has been intentionality in picking a character that's not just Super Hitler but also daddy's issues incarnate and making him so sexy ("straights" say "charismatic") in a way to ensure thirsty memes and fanart from people that don't care about context.
Yeah true, it's just a story anyway, with aliens and superheroes, there's nothing wrong in manipulating fictional characters.
As long as you don't say that it is a more realistic take on superhero stories, because it's not.
It's just a Silver Age story gilded with gore.
