Have been reading fic featuring John Constantine on Ao3
and looking up pictures
and finding tumblrs that haven't posted in like a decade but did do a lot of pictures of his tattoos and spells.

Have decided that Vertigo Hellblazer is darker than I actually want to read, which I decided once before hence not having any but one of them any more.

Also the summaries I read on the internet are veeeeery different on different wikis and fansites. Like, not agreeing on the basic facts, different. So that's handy.

I do not know what DC have been doing with Justice League Dark but I am not sure I want to find out. I mean that was my conclusion from reading up on the animated movies I found but also, that's... a lot. Complicated. Tangles. None of it has gripped my imagination so far.

Well, almost none. I was reading a lot of fic with a new to me character in and then an author's note said he was only ever in comics as the villain in at most six issues of nu52. And I am reasonably certain that what the fic has been doing with him is not what the comics did. It's like they don't understand the appeal of starcrossed bisexual polyamory where the members can be seen as worked examples of the road not taken for each other.

I shall probably finish reading all the fic in this category pretty soon.



I am increasingly concluding that the guy in my head, smudged together from The Interesting Bits of vaguely remembered stories across at least thirty years by now, is someone who needs to fly be free into his own version of the Trenchcoat Urban Wizard archetype. John is archetypal now and there's so many versions of him out there. It's cool, but. Makes it frustrating when we're all giving him the same name. My guy leaves out so much canon did in any given canon I can't keep calling him Constantine, though obviously there is no shortage of Johns.

Actually I looked up a graph of naming in the UK and apparently John as a name has swooped waaaaaaay down the rankings, enough it gets age specific to assume it is The Ubiquitous Name. It's still top 200 but it's not top 100 let alone top 10. And you only have to check the historical graph on behindthename to see it sitting near as anything at number one for most of the twentieth century. But that means people in their 20s or 30s already have a different perspective on the ranking.

I mean when I was in school no one called John or James was actually called John or James except by teachers, because you'd never sort them all out. They just had nicknames.

Weird way to feel old.




I have been thinking about chosen names though. Like, who would choose to be John Constantine, with all this all as an open book example? Who would name themselves after Jack Harkness? It's not quite compelling enough to write up but it's a shiny to turn over. Because obviously the original characters choose to be themselves on a daily basis, and Harkness chose the name. And I remember cosplaying and trying to do The Swagger for an assortment of characters (conclusion: different with these hips). People choose who to be and some of it is from an array of pop cultural options and no amount of being an absolute disaster will be offputting to all observers.

Like tattoos. Trying to find ones the characters have leads to ever so many that people have of the characters. Which is a lot to wear around, you know?


And I was also thinking about magic and the meaning of spells. I was thinking of autoantonyms. That is words that mean their own opposites. People used them 'wrong' so many times that there are two common widely held and opposite meanings. And if you think the Words matter in magic? Really interesting gnarly problem. If you find an old spell it's not just a cursive lemon demon problem, it's about knowing what all those words meant to That person at That time. Which is basically impossible.

And then the symbols! How many symbols have we used and drifted away from over the past few decades because all the connotations went weird? Even skipping the symbols that end up on the ADL list there's a whole set about snakes and lions and badgers and ravens. Those are all big powerful symbols but then someone repackaged them for their trademarked magic school books. And now what do they mean?

So you get these big Magic symbols, the complicated swirly ones people look up and argue about, and what they originally meant has been written over and colonised so many times, not least by comics using them. And anyone trying to sell you a strict package of meanings is trying to sell you a whole lot else as well.

Plus the bit from Wrath of the Righteous where Mephistopheles explains devil contracts and how one time someone laughed at the idea he owned their soul because look at this misspelled contract, that isn't written Mephistopheles, is that even your name?

Mephistopheles goes off and does a hell legal thing, comes back and says, It Is Now.

That's potentially so overpowered. But it's like being able to buy up companies and trade as the new names. Here you are with all these contracts, oops they're with Hell now, wonder how that'll work out for everyone.

... now I'm imagining having some really good contracts and some archdevil just goes off and tries to steal your name and you have to pursue it in court...

I mean it's more a chaos thing to steal names, law would get you to sign them over.

Still. Tricky.



I am pondering also historical specificity in characters and horror stories and what it does to have a specific time and place and social and legal situation involved.

Like, say you've got two characters who are born three years apart, so when homosexual activity got legal one was 13 and one was already 16 when the Act was passed. You could reasonably extrapolate tha they had different reactions to that. Like maybe the 16 yeqr old had already decided to ignore the law, because sex. But the 13 year old could look at the law and think, well, 21 is legal, waiting for legal is at least theoretically possible. And then 21 is a long way away. But it gets interesting if his rebel phase starts then.

Or, you can have those two characters both in the same year at school, and they see the laws change and they will effect them exactly the same. But they choose different.

One is a story about the impact of social factors on the individual and the other is just, like, free will.

But if you don't give the story specificity you don't have the option of the layer of story that is about social factors.

And that drives the horror into the realms of the purely personal, sort of, ish. Like the horror might be about believing you were always already a sinner and that might have clear resonance with being queer in a homophobic religious context, but without specifics to attach it to the social legal religious layers are being ignored and it is being presented as a purely personal issue.

Horror can be used for so much. Not all of it particularly freeing.



The older I get the more I feel like I don't have much to say, seeing as I haven't been leaving the house much for... well, pretty much ever.

But on the other hand I see some of what other people have to say and kind of want to flag it up
like er, hang on, actually...



Today's thought is looping back to Legends of Tomorrow and how you make such a different story out of saving Astra or Astra saving herself, who misuses what powers, how that works out long term. They spun some interesting changes there.

Like Dawn on the tower being sacrificed. That was her blood and her power. How different does the story get if they'd spent the year teaching her to use it?



And I get frustrated how seldom you get generations of female power. Like Willow was basically self taught after Jenny was killed off, and skipped the summer with the Coven like all she learned there was detox. The story is a woman alone finding her power. Into every generation.

Like erasing women's writing and finding out there are women in SF like the new big thing, it is wearying.



So I have thoughts rattling around but neither story nor conclusions just yet.

Shall see.

I watched the episode of Legends of Tomorrow where Mick gets brain surgery by a physicist because Stein cannot handle talking him down, and the crew just lets them.
That's a different sort of messed up than the usual run around, you know?
Season 2 is rough on Mick being treated like a person.
Also he is having a bit of a same room different genre problem due to the Horrors.
And mostly the others haven't noticed.

The chip in Mick's brain seems like entire depths of Horrors that the story skimmed right past.
I do like that Stein apologised for forgetting about the Chronos thing but it isn't kind that they're forgetting about the Chronos thing.
Except for how it leaves them treating him like Mick, not the puppet bad guy.
... treating him like Mick doesn't involve a lot of respect though.

Going from Mick offering Ray partnership to exploding the gun and Ray being new besties with Nate is just
yowch
even though it is good story. Like that happens sometimes, people don't fit when they're trying and do click when they're not expecting it.

The thing with George Lucas being why two of them are heroes is... possibly more fun to film makers? Like culture matters but having it boil down to one film each is a little simplifying. But leaves them with plenty of fun references to do.

I think maybe I wasn't in a Legends headspace because the run around seemed too silly and the Horrors too real.



Also this week I am poking Ao3 for Constantine fic and... so so much fic, so many confusing canons, all in a soup. Not sure what I'm even looking for.

Well, I am looking for the episodes of the actual TV show, but I am getting them wrapped for xmas so until then I don't even know if I'll like those. The Horrors without the Legends will be a very different viewing experience, if that's what it's like.



I am not getting much done even with a chart to remind me to Actually Read Watch Listen Play A Thing.

December is not my favourite.

I get puzzled by people hating things in advance.
Especially reboots or sequels or sequels they insist are reboots.

I get it if there's some egregious detail known like 'but this time everyone is straight and white except the bad guys' or suchlike, but not when they're doing this from a standing start.

An existing story is being taken as inspiration for new story. Will they use the parts we thought were the good stuff? Don't know, do care, so it's potentially stressful. Will they use the bad stuff the makers didnt seem to evaluate properly the first time? Well that was always a problem, so the only way is up. ... actually no I can think of so many downs but you do at least have room for improvement. And, is The Thing that everyone was there for the first time, still a Thing we could stand to see in stories? Well generally yeah or we'd be bored of the basic idea by now.

Even if we get some horrible shambling husk of a came back wrong, it's not like it rewrites the original.

... blu ray and streaming upscaled releases do enough of that already...



It's especially puzzling when these are fanfic people. Someone with a budget is doing their fic grand scale. Hope they tag it well and move on, you know?



And one can always hope for good things, because we are as ever in a cultural moment that could really stand to get some actual feminism in it. Amongst so many other things.




Of course at my current rates of pop cultural consumption I might catch up to any new broadcast sometime around the point it is old enough to vote, but that is a separate problem.

I did eventually finish rereading Dresden Files Storm Front.
It did not change my opinion of the main character or the book.
Slimy.

Also I am just very bored with the style of story where they only ever find anything out when it tries to eat them. They lurch between murder attempts and figure out who dunnit because everyone else is dead. It is tedious.

I did get stuck for a while in the middle of yet another fight sequence
remembering a plot bunny for Legends of Tomorrow
visiting my home town.

It sort of doesn't have a punchline or payoff yet, but you get half a dozen characters exploring one place you know pretty well, you find half a dozen angles to see it from and at least half a dozen interwoven communities to have them connect with. You learn more about the characters and the place they're visiting. Do that whole 'a stranger comes to town' and stress test reactions.

... in Legends the reaction usually involves crime and bar fights so far. two seasons isn't long to have that come up this many times, and I haven't finished the second season...

If it is someone playing defence on their own territory the story has to keep on coming up with reasons to introduce a new bit when the point of view character knows it real well. Either you get their opinions straight up, which for Harry seems to mean him saying wizards aren't very smart but treating non wizards like they are deeply stupid, or they have to go around doing the sensory detail thing and describing things a lot. It makes them sound weird about clothes, or the people in them, to keep trying to convey data through physical elements, and really I'm not sure how much telling the fashions are going to manage. Sometimes the clothes are a symbol set adding to the story, but the connotations have to derive from somewhere first, and if it isn't shared *persistent* pop culture by the time you read it then either meaning gets lost or the book has to tell us what it's own symbols mean.

Duster and staff is a strong set of images but imagine Westerns as a genre fading out of pop culture, or coming back in with a different point of view, and suddenly the story hasn't adequately explained itself.

I was thinking about it because magic items on Pathfinder's Golarion can be ten thousand years old and still work, albeit with a possibility of quirks. Thassilonian stuff turns up in several of the adventure paths I've read but it also does some fun weird things by now. But the art from the books and computer games has to pick a visual style to go with the magic objects, and with the change in visual assets since Kingmaker, you get at least two visually distinct styles of common magic items in cultures that pretty much share a border. Individual makers have distinct styles even. And then they color code the bonuses. Half the time I use the Prestidigipainter just to make the look in the vague ballpark of unified.

Adventurer gear gets very visually busy.

I've thought about Adventurer's Aposematism where the flashy warns off the less well equipped, but consider, you can't really afford to throw a magic item away just because it is, for instance, Ancient Osirian, when you are not even modern Osirian. You could end up with clashing visual statements covering longer than Earth human history.

Your magic items would contain stitching older than Earth humans had writing.



And then you need to just pull off that visual ensemble with some kind of panache
while at the same time being aware that even your shirt and cloak are Adventurer practical enough
they count as Going Equipped
for some fairly large tasks
even at the scale calibrated by a hundred years of war.

... there's a bit in Dance of Masks where these tiny little first level NPCs get aggressive and go red for enemy
and then just drop dead.

It actually took me a while to figure out that's because there's two items the party were wearing that do damage to all in range enemies.

They were only wearing them to add some elemental damage to end regenerating enemies.

But that tiny smidge of damage by the standards of adventurers that can afford those clothes is
all the hit points and then some
for a first level NPC.

Which is wild.

The plot relevant characters have different maths on Just Not Dying.

Adventures sure do make some Choices.

ANYway.

In a story you wear a specific visual statement meant to elicit a reaction from the expected audience.

In an adventure you wear whatever makes number go up when the number in question is your chance of survival.

It sort of speaks less but screams more.



I still do not recall why I have a shelf of these particular wizard books.


They are giving me that I Can Sneeze Better Book Than This feeling.



... if and only if I actually write it down of course...