Afterglow

"You've got to learn to save yourself

Before you find there's nothing left

But bitterness

And hollowness

And afterglow"

 

Garbage - Afterglow

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"This year's football was pulled away from you through the courtesy of women's lib."

Charles Schultz - Peanuts, 1971/09/26

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Fun fact: the first story attempt posted to this blog was titled Ephemeron. I put up the first half, started on the second and only belatedly realized I couldn't decide between two endings. Then decided I liked neither well enough. Thus Ephemeron persists solely in hiding. One of these years I might even complete it. Point being: when I hit a "wtf am I doing, where am I going with this thing?" moment, I simply stopped writing it. Because I could. <- important plot point

 

Anyway, amidst my romp through the Koronus Expanse, I was wondering when I'd once again run into NPC companions so annoying I'd refuse to even run through their introductions. Didn't take long.

The debonair fortune-seeker stereotype peaked in romantic age fiction*, was still celebrated by the time of Errol Flynn, was only barely kept on life support by the likes of Harrison Ford, and has in no way been refreshed since via an infusion of feminism. While the older Zorros' mix of helping the little people and "for the lulz" swashbuckling could be directed against various inimical industries, foreign occupation, decadent aristocrats, a family feud, what-have-you, a female variant will rather invariably (and monotonously) default to fighting against the opposite sex, with any further justification tacked on as an afterthought. So Rogue Trader's Jae Hey-dearie gets introduced as cheated out of her rightful plunder by a sinister bald old male mobster who's intimidated by her sheer curly pouty awesomeness. We immediately proceed to a bar where she shoots her way through three broad-shouldered mooks and is praised as a friend of the people by another woman who's had her jaw broken for talking too openly - presumably in a direct fistfight with The Patriarchy itself.

Well, seeing no option to just kill her, Jae can damn well rot in that bar. Once a story or character dives into the "man bad, woman good" pitfall, it just doesn't dig its way back out. Picking randomly of the endless object lessons out there, you can try a movie called The Snowman, ostensibly about a serial killer in Norway. Quaint in the first place because Norwegians are ~12 times more likely to kill themselves than each other; odder because yes of course the imaginary serial killer targets women whom he considers bad mothers, never mind that in Norway men are as everywhere far more likely to kill each other than raise their hand against a woman, with about half again more male victims of homicide.*** Not odd at all when you realize the only crime our fiction now consistently recognizes is rape (always male on female) and the general existence of men. Though a confused mess, The Snowman makes clear enough whence its confusion stems, its plot, setting and characters mere pretexts to force-feed the audience a maximized lump of propagandist set pieces. There had to be a rape scene, and an evil pimp, and a male domestic abuser, and an overblown subplot dedicated to a prostitution ring with a somehow completely clueless and innocent prostitute, and a man declaring himself worthless next to his wife and child, and the wife legitimizing his worth by returning to him as her mate even-though-he-doesn't-deserve-her, and men failing at fathering, and a woman seducing a man because boys-are-dumb, and men murdering women due to just plain hating women, and a woman driven to madness by the sheer evil of maleness, and a climactic scene where the hero tells the villain he should hate his father instead of his mother. Everything else in the "story" merely scaffolds the holy edifice of misandry. Plus ending with the hero volunteering to investigate yet another ritualistic murder of a woman, because of course.

But that desperate need to cram in yet another repetition of the "man bad, woman good" mantra before the credits, got me thinking about an old observation about webcomics. Most never get a proper ending, their authors' interest or time investment merely running its course to abandonment of the project, left dangling "on hiatus" in perpetuity or until the web host goes under, whichever comes first. But when this happens, check if you can notice a certain pattern to the last note struck more often than others:

- Sufficiently Remarkable -  a slice-of-life comic about an art major gal living the bohemian metropolitan life - ends with her kicking a man into trash before warmly reuniting with her female roommate

- Family Man - I had great hopes for this one, a beautifully researched and culturally developed historical comic about academic inquisitiveness with a shamanistic/lycanthropic twist - unfortunately also a matriarchal twist, and its last panel left off with a woman ordering a man to his knees (purely for his own good of course)

- Weregeek - having devolved from jokes about geeky hobbies to dating dramedy for years, its last story had a woman trouncing men in fencing - ends with her boyfriend proposing marriage in full medieval costume, only for her to rag on him for apparently upstaging her renfaire tournament victory (I would agree based on individuality, but if you can't figure out what's wrong with that scene, reverse the polarity: imagine a man winning a tournament and his girlfriend proposing to him, at which he flies into a rage, humiliating her for it, because how dare she try to muscle in on his moment of glory with her proposal, how. dare!)

- The Meek - fantasy kingdom intrigue by the same indoctrinated pate what brought you Mare Internum, and equally confused in its pre-chewed moralism, its high point being a king flying into a rage and murdering a visiting diplomat through her eye sockets for no reason - ends with a girl standing up for her mother's honor to her father and waxing desperately distraught at him marrying her off

- Bearmageddon - humanity besieged by mutant grizzlies, with all the high-octane gorefest that entails - ends with the revelation that the heroes' grandstanding environmentalist is a hypocrite driving a smog factory of a customized van, and abandoned his pregnant wife to boot!

- The Last Halloween - monsters from the monster dimension murder humanity, and only a little girl can save us - its penultimate page features a recently introduced secondary character finding her abusive boyfriend flayed alive only to abandon him, reassured by her female companion that it's better this way, she's where she belongs, with another woman

I won't sift through all of TopWebComics's pile of outdated links, but you should be spotting a trend.

Granted plenty of other comics have died mid-scene featuring plenty of other objects, elements or themes, but you just don't find a laser battle or car chase reiterated so many times as a comic's last gasp. Most probably peter out at a point invisible to most of us (when donations stop flowing in) but such a recurring coincidence with our society's most pervasive point of greatest moral outrage and grandstanding ("man bad, woman good") should raise an eyebrow. A movie or a video game will continue production to sell the finished product even if it must include one or twenty moronic scenes. But the fate of a serialized solo project the day its creator asks "wtf did I just publish" looking at yesterday's page is far more flexible.

Maybe such authors ran out of proverbial gas already, and only devoted one last stretch of effort towards performing one last ritualistic burning in effigy of a perpetual acceptable target.

Maybe, on the contrary, they simply feel such condemnation has crested their creative apogee, and nothing they further concoct could match the glory of hurling a man in garbage where he belongs. As a meet-cute.

For once though I'll allow myself a creaking, dusty sliver of optimism. Dare one hope you wondered where exactly you're going with this thing, and more importantly why? Realized your creative effort was being derailed by a memetic infection demanding you interject a bad man to be defeated or condescended to by good women, regardless of your story's actual purpose? Sussed contriving reasons to slam down, demonize or skin alive a hated demographic leads down no other narrative path than constantly doubling down on the self-justifying bigotry? Maybe you had not originally intended to manufacture some piece of supremacist propaganda masquerading as "justice" according to your sophomore year creative writing professor's ranting. Coughed at peanut dust from 1971 on a supposedly trendy topic? Grokked dogma as a refuge for the incompetent, an I.O.U. from a bankrupt imagination?

 

Or you just fired up Netflix, viewed one of the endless thousands of feminist propaganda pieces already glutting the zeitgeist and saw your market share for the infinitesimal sliver you'd get by piling on with the most retread moralism in the history of storytelling: man bad, woman good. Well, they say there are many paths to enlightenment. I suppose one of them could meander through the marketing department...

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* Consider that our best modern reference for such characters comes from The Princess Bride, a send-up of their conventions. A sympathetic one, sure, but nonetheless demonstrating an Inigo would be hard to take completely serious nowadays.

** As usual when you find yourself faced with feminist equality, reverse the polarity: show me every popular movie/game male hero introduced as opposing a wicked old woman then shooting several women and being praised for it by another man to demonstrate his righteousness.

*** Granted, that's a far more egalitarian ratio than in most places.